"I cannot speak any language", she said blankly in Tamil.

Somewhat amused I repeated my question in Tamil. She was shocked at
hearing a familiar tongue out of the blue in that mega international carnival that the WSF came to signify to Mumbaikars.

"Oh! Just walk straight, turn right, then left then right and you will come to the highway", she replied still recovering from her shock.

I wondered what the WSF meant to her.

"Where have you come from?" I asked.

"From Tamil Nadu", she replied.

"Have you attended any sessions here", I asked.

"Oh no, I can't understand anything. I don't understand English or Hindi", she replied.

"What made you come to the WSF then?" I asked. She smiled coyly.

"I wanted to see Bombay", she said. I was touched by her reply.

Why not, I thought at first. If some NGO is willing to foot the bill for a simple girl from a small town or village to see the Big City, what's wrong with that? Except, I wish it had been done more explicitly. All around us there were thousands and thousands of people milling about, dancing, shopping, singing, talking, laughing, eating everywhere in the city and in the venue outside the conference halls.

There was a carnival atmosphere at the WSF, no doubt. The urban, the educated, the Hindi and English speaking were inside the conference halls,
the vernacular speakers from small towns and villages, like my acquaintance, were outside. Indeed what else could they do except create a carnival atmosphere outside by their sheer presence?

When an event like the WSF comes to one's own backyard, as it did for me this year when it arrived in Mumbai, one gets to hear and see things that are impossible to do as a visitor from outside elsewhere.

"They have brought simultaneous translation equipment from France and other countries for themselves. Obviously this gathering is not for our people, it is for them to meet one another", an unemployed electrician, former trade union organiser and youth activist now hired to do electrical work on the site, told me.

Ironically, the NESCO grounds or New Standard Engineering Company grounds was at one time a large engineering company that employed between four to five thousand workers in its hey days. Today the factory has disappeared and the premises turned into an exhibition ground. The workers too have become invisible, melting into Mumbai's teaming millions. Hardly anyone in the plenary sessions of the WSF thought it appropriate or necessary to remember the workers on whose work site their meeting was being held. Is this the shape of Another World that is yet to come?

"They could have hired unemployed workers to do the work of erecting the venue," said another trade union friend. battling with his employers to keep the workers' jobs. "Instead they hired the largest events contractors in the state, the third largest in the country. The contractor who erected the structures for the WSF conference usually undertakes work for political parties like the Congress", he said.

As the conference halls reverberated with anti-globalisation talk, about the evils of capitalism, unemployment and so forth, the workers of closed factories in and around Goregoan, the suburb where WSF descended, and indeed the workers of NESCO, had little hopes of getting causal work even for a few weeks as WSF organisers erected sound proofed conference halls, fitting it with lighting, multimedia gadgets and other hi tech facilities. Whoever said practice had to come before preaching or even go alongside? If Another World is possible as the WSF tells us, can it come without another way of doing things?

A student from a social work college in Chennai and not in any sense an activist of any description, who went there because her college sent her, said to me later:

"I came away disgusted. They had paraded these poor dalits and adivasis
who knew nothing about what was happening and made them stand outside their stalls for people to see. The poor people stood there and gaped ... it is gross ... making such a spectacle of the poor. I walked away, I couldn't bear it... ".

Outside the gates a huge banner announced: "Let's Join Together to make a
Communist World Possible - Communist Party of India." The CPI, a long-term
ally of the Indian National Congress, the party in power for four decades after Independence, could lose its status as an all India political party as it does not have the requisite votes across three or more states. Were political parties in or out of the WSF? They were seen everywhere with their banners, their books, and most importantly in the Organising Committee. The public in India may not know much about the big Northern NGOs. They do however know CPI and CPM.

The Times of India had a page devoted to WSF over the duration of the Forum. Hardly surprising, given that a senior member of the editorial team of the Times of India was given the responsibility of co-ordinating and liaising with the press for the WSF. The glitterati were well profiled. There were many of them: the former Prime Minister of Ireland and UN Commissioner for Human Rights, former president of India, former Primer Minister of India, former Vice President of the World Bank, sitting MPs from different countries, judges, Nobel Prize winners, Alternate Nobel Prize winners and, with the increasing numbers of retired bureaucrats setting up NGOs in the "third World", many ex-bureaucrats in their new avatars.

Typically the vernacular press was not so enthusiastic. If stories doing the rounds in the journalist circuits are to be believed, a Marathi journalist with secular credentials (there aren't many of them left these days) was offered Rs 5, 00,000 to liase with the Marathi press. Not happy with the offer, he decided to go over, across the road, to be the liaison person for the Mumbai Resistance 2004, a parallel conference. On the offer being raised to Rs 15,00,000 he went back to work for the WSF. Does it sound like the same old world?

A group of Dalit activists I ran into were agog. In the political life of Mumbai city wall writing and postering has always been a part of political work that rank and file activists did as a matter of course.

"Did you hear that - they are paying three hundred rupees a night for wall writing and postering", they cried out incredulously. The WSF was a culture shock in more than one sense.

Not surprisingly the poor and their issues remained absent from the pages of newspapers. For example, the struggles in Bolivia, one of the important anti-globalisation, anti-capitalist struggles by the poor in recent times went unnoticed with twenty people turning up at their meeting. If the WSF was about anti-globalisation, the Bolivians should have been up there, on the podium during the opening session. The poor were not visible on the podiums of the WSF events or the plenary sessions. Ironically the WSF carnival took place against the backdrop of sharp increases in extra-judicial killings in India known as "encounter deaths".

The federal government had only weeks ago approved increased budget support to states fighting "terrorism", a term that now replaces the earlier "extremism". For the social democrats and political liberals overshadowed by the right-wing politics in their own countries this was time to be in the headlines once again.

The WSF in Mumbai was a marriage between the ideological capabilities of
large NGOs and the organisational capabilities of the Communist Party of India, Marxist. The CPM, the party in power in the state of West Bengal for over three decades, is known for its bureaucratic functioning, an ageing leadership, the decimation of its trade union base in Mumbai and elsewhere, the bloody repression of the peasant and youth movements in Bengal in the sixties and seventies and for making its peace with the World Bank in more recent times.

The NGOs are known for their "pluralism", usually a single issue organisation working locally, led by urban activists and flush with foreign funds (according to estimates the cost of organising the WSF was enough to fund Mumbai's municipal schools for one year). Stranger bedfellows would be hard to imagine. Now that the venue is cleared up and people have gone home it is clear to see that far from being a marriage it was an exciting fling. The CPM is back on the election trail, due in April-May and the NGOs back to their business.

With so many big wigs: important people, MPs, ex-ministers, judges and many others from countries of the North and elsewhere, the state government was not letting down the Organising Committee of the WSF in Mumbai. Again, a worker hired to work in erecting the venue said:

"Four times a day the health inspectors come to ask and inquire what we are doing and how. Phones from the Mantralaya (State secretariat) keep ringing. This is certainly a big deal for the government ... they don't want anything going wrong."

The state Chief Minister could not contain his curiosity and turned up at the WSF venue, as did a senior Congress leader. If there is a carnival in town why should anyone be stopped from having a bit of fun?

A group of young girls from St. Xaviers' College in South Bombay decided they were not going to miss out on the fun. I recognised one of them.

"What are you girls doing here" I asked knowing that globalisation, capitalism or poverty would be the last thing on her mind.

"We heard we could get some real cool T shirts," she said. "Did you see one that says "Stop Bitching Start the Revolution" ... we read about it in the papers ... "

Is Another World going to turn out to be a variant of the old pop-culture, what with snazzy T shirts and dating agencies for activists (also written about in the Times of India)?

From the atmosphere at NESCO grounds at least, Another World is going to be a world without politics. In the meantime, the Hindu right wing party, the BJP, has fully occupied the political vacuum. It declared early elections. Not only did the BJP not bother with the WSF but the Prime Minister came to the city and addressed his own rally, big enough with only local mobilisation.

No carnivals are spontaneous events however. The WSF was a five tiered
event and what you made of it depended on which tier you go access to. The
first tier comprised the rich, the famous and the glamorous who hit the headlines in newspapers and the TV talk shows and some of them were seen at the opening plenary sessions.

The second tier was what was described as the WSF organised events. These events were organised and conducted by the NGOs that contributed to the core leadership of the WSF.

The third tier was what was described as self-organised events. These events were organised by the participants themselves in the belief that their events would get the same attention as the WSF events. Unlike the WSF events, the self-organised events were neither advertised nor acknowledged by the WSF organisers. They had the physical space to be there and that was all. Consequently few people knew of the self-organised events and by and large the groups ended up meeting people they worked with or knew about anyway.

The fourth tier were people like the Tamil girl I met, the adivasis and dalits, who made up the numbers, the spectacle.

And, lastly there were the spectators who came because the Forum was
presented to Mumbaikars as a carnival, much like the religious carnivals in India where the poor and the ordinary folk go out for a bit of decent fun.
The high priests bless them from high podiums and retreat behind closed
doors to discuss the finer theological points of what is and is not good for the "ordinary masses".