Mumbai: Maximum alert can't maximize well-being

The tumult of a world growing ever more closed and insecure has found its mirror, especially in India's metros, in the slow degeneration of social structures and, worse, in the loss of community and childhood experiences.

- TULSI JAYAKUMAR

Mumbai once nurtured remarkable micro-communities: the chawl with its shared taps and gossip, the middle-class colony where Diwali meant collective rangoli patterns, and the narrow lanes where children played under the benign eyes of neighbours who might scold yet feed them. These spaces blurred class lines and built the city’s greatest scaffold of invisible infrastructure: trust.

A recent Netflix documentary, The Perfect Neighbor, created almost entirely from police bodycam footage, reveals the paranoia and potential for ruin that emerge as the social fabric that binds a community begins to fray. The film revisits the 2023 killing of Ajike ‘AJ’ Owens, a 35-year-old African-American mother of four, shot by her Caucasian neighbour, Susan Lorincz, in Florida. Lorincz had spent over 18 months repeatedly calling 911 to complain about neighbourhood children playing outside, making noise and trespassing on property (not hers). When Owens knocked on her door to confront her about racial slurs hurled at her kids, Lorincz fired through her locked door, killing her. The incident is horrifying but also symbolic. It captures what happens when fear replaces familiarity and surveillance replaces sociability. Jessica Winter, in