From the WSJ Opinion Archives
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Economy of Manners
Want a taste of old New York? Try Bombay.
When I read the recent Reader's Digest survey ranking cities in order of politeness, I couldn't help feeling a shock of recognition. My home for this summer, New York, is ranked at the top, while my hometown of Mumbai, India--still known as Bombay to much of the world--comes in last out of the 35 cities polled.
I ruefully admit that, based on my own experience, the verdict is just: I find Mumbai squalid, loud and rude. A month ago, an American friend visited me there. As we strolled through the downtown section of the city--from the rail terminus named after Queen Victoria to the Gateway commemorating the 1911 visit of King George V--we were literally sliding between masses of human flesh. No one seemed aware of two pathetic youngsters trying simply to make their way along a city street. I am used to this kind of pushy crowdedness; but I felt a bit embarrassed to be escorting my friend through it all.
At first glance, it is true, the Digest's rankings smack of cultural hegemony. Cities in Asia are ranked at the bottom, and those in the Western world are at the top. Indeed, the magazine seems to apply a Western standard of politeness everywhere, although every society has a different measure of manners. How do we settle who is globally most polite without being unfair at best or imperialist at worst? Maybe we're just not comparing apples to apples.
After viewing the rankings, I wondered where New York or London might have fallen on the list if this survey had been done a century ago. Thomas Bender, a historian at New York University and the author of "New York Intellect," tells me that the city's reputation in the 18th and 19th centuries was certainly not a genteel one. "This was a town that placed too much emphasis on speed and intensity . . . hustle and bustle," he says, recalling the acid accounts of the novelist Henry James and even President John Adams.
So what has caused New York to change so dramatically? To borrow the campaign message of a now suburban New Yorker: "It's the economy, stupid." At the turn of the 20th century, New York (along with other major Western cities) was primarily industrial, its inhabitants blue-collar folk. Today the city's economy is service-driven. Its inhabitants include plenty of investment bankers, corporate lawyers, media bigwigs and absurdly well-to-do avant-garde artists.
Joel Kotkin, the author of "The City: A Global History," marks this phase as the last rung on a ladder that Western cities have climbed. "First there is foundation, then growth, and now gentility," he says. "Western cities have literally become gentrified now that they are service-oriented."
If cities evolve, then Mumbai and other cities of the East will inevitably be on the lower rungs of the ladder. They have experienced the Industrial Revolution only in the last 50 years. A century ago, few in New York really had the time to sip cappuccinos. The same holds true for Hong Kong and Mumbai today.
Now that I think of it, Mumbai today is probably a good approximation of New York, London or Paris in the late 19th century. New York then was an immigrant hotbed, teeming with Italians who formed gangs and Irish who acted as cogs in that giant political machine, Tammany Hall. Victorian London calls to mind those Dickensian pickpockets. Post-revolutionary Paris was a magnet for poor immigrants from the countryside who transformed a grand city into a slum.
Today, Mumbai houses Asia's largest slum; it also draws thousands of poor villagers from elsewhere in India, people trying to escape drought and starvation. So when my nostrils are assaulted by the stench of certain neighborhoods, or when I am pushed out of line while climbing onto a bus, I find solace knowing that New Yorkers were used to similar sniffs when Teddy Roosevelt was their police commissioner.
I expect things will improve in Mumbai the way they have in New York. Whereas once people flocked here out of economic necessity, today, says Mr. Kotkin, "everyone who lives in New York does so by choice." And the population has decreased accordingly. A square mile in New York houses 27,720 people; in Mumbai, 69,684. Can people be polite to each other in such circumstances? I remember about five years ago, watching an elderly man help a schoolboy figure out the complex Mumbai suburban trains. It was a rare instance, but I think that kind of exchange will become more common as economic opportunity in India begins to make life easier and calmer.
I predict that if a similar survey were conducted 100 years from now, Mumbai will be ranked somewhere at the top. Just as certain Mumbaiites today, reading of the politeness survey, rail against Reader's Digest for its parochial worldview, people in Phnom Penh or Dhaka will do the same in 2106 when the India Times brings out its own rankings. Someone then can console the poor Cambodians or Bangladeshis by noting all of the other gifts--improved health, less poverty, more food--that capitalism brings before politeness.
Mr. Bhattacharya is a summer Bartley fellow at The Wall Street Journal.
