ABSTRACT
This chapter provides fleeting, tightly pressed voices, reflecting in a sense the nature of the fast, fugitive and perhaps furious experience in this city of smoky quartz. The shanty homes largely lie behind roadsides fronted with shops, restaurants, small businesses, places of worship, street vendors, and hawkers. The scientist Vikram Sarabhai’s ambitions seem to have been vindicated ‘by moving atomic energy away from the industrial grid and into the lived texture of people’s existence’. The harshness of city living in which the strongest survived had, to a greater or lesser extent, induced what may be described as a process of ethical fission in the glare of a philosophy of toughness. Television’s post-liberalised dependency on investigative journalism gives the media the image of crusader and pioneer, a striking contrast to the pre-1990s period where the government-run Doordarshan had a conservative monopoly on television news.
