We don’t realise this because we don’t lift our necks up and see anything beside our screens, but when you do, you will see it but it doesn’t have the same effect as when you remove your earphones and hear the conflict. I did this while returning home sitting in the train and my earphones died.

The first thing I heard was 2 people shouting at each other about something that was so pointless and meaningless. I continued observing and realised that this city has two kinds of people. There are the ones who are just shouting, frowning their eyebrows, clenching their fists and tensing their forehead. And there were others who were quiet, but they were not peaceful. You could see in their eyes that they are dead inside. Sitting with their heads rested, and arms on their thighs, staring at nothing and having no expressions on their face, breathing from their mouth. The city's chaos got the better of them and now they are just existing. Floating in time with no direction. They had no life left in them. And the people who do have the energy, they channel it into anger and chaos.

I was walking in the station after getting out of the train and I kept observing. A husband was shouting at his wife over how she did not get off the train the right way. A group of people were shouting at each other over which is the right platform. A guy was talking on a call about how much work he has tomorrow. Things that don’t need to be chaotic have started to become chaotic. We have forgotten what it is like to be calm.

I walked past a slum while taking a faster route to my house. You would think that at least in their own houses people would be out of conflict and chaos. I heard yelling from a house and I couldn’t help myself but peek. I saw two grown men shouting at the top of their lungs while they were eating food. They are shouting with food still in their mouth, that’s how badly we want to make sure we are heard in all this chaos. The women in the house were silent and looking at the wall, they were the lifeless ones. A mother was slapping her little kid violently and shouting at him, channeling chaos into that poor kid and taking away whatever little life he has left in him.

After reading all this, you might be thinking this happened sometime during the evening when chaos is at its peak, but it is so baffling that all this conflict I saw was at 11 in the night. When we are supposed to end our day and give our lifeless bodies some rest, we are still adding fuel to the chaos. When the world is sleeping, we have people in this city arguing and quarreling like it's the break of dawn.

Some people say that’s the beauty of Mumbai, this city never sleeps, but I did not find anything beautiful about what I saw. That sentence has lost all its meaning at this point. This city is dying, and the hard part is we are finding comfort in this negativity. We are starting to like it.

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