Niya Bajaj 

While people say the world is getting smaller the allure of traveling to a city where no body knows your name, where you can reinvent yourself at will is still an exhilarating prospect. There are few better places to do so than major metropolis, the maximum cities where life is fast paced, where the new devours the old and where everything changes but nothing is truly lost. This article begins a series of pieces about 3 such cities: Mumbai, London and Toronto. Traveling east to west, we shall begin with Mumbai 

Mumbai is a frenetically busy, chaotic but organized city where if you can afford it, the world can be delivered to your door every day. Commerce is the life-blood of the city and it is said that you are ready to truly leave Mumbai when you are no longer interested in trading and making money. The currency in Mumbai, as in the rest of India is the rupee with an exchange rate of approximately $1 Canadian (CAD) to 38 Indian Rupees (INR). While Hindi is the national language, English is commonly spoken, albeit at a slower pace than it is in North America.

As the gateway to the West – this is the city that houses the Gateway to India – Mumbai both prepares Indians for the western world, and western tourists for the very different Indian one. Thus it is a city of immigrants, refugees and tourists all of whom are making their temporary homes in a city that is constantly adjusting to the pressure of sheltering over 16 million people, slightly less than half of whom live in slums. Despite the lack of space Mumbaikers are a hospitable people who will open their homes and hearths.

Like most major metropolitan city Mumbai is the backdrop for a multiplicity of stories, both in print and online. However, there are two instances where the city becomes the subject of the text, thus allowing it’s readers a glimpse of it’s darker, seedier under belly properly juxtaposed against it’s bright and happy exterior. Along with Joe Bindloss’ Lonely Planet guide and a copy of Time Out Mumbai, there are two pieces of fiction about the city that must be read.

While both of them decant the essence of the city and render it tangible on paper Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City delves into the geography, politics, and major powers behind the city’s every day running. His work is peppered with anecdotes from Bollywood film makers and dance bar girls as well as local thugs and slum dwellers. Also anecdotal, but in a strikingly different way Lisa Sipes’ text Inside Mumbai: Conversations with Ten Women provides a window into the precariously balanced world of personal advancement and social propriety that upper middle class women in Mumbai inhabit.

In addition to providing a variety of experiences and resources of literary work, Mumbai is home to the North Indian version of Hollywood. Bollywood, unlike its north American counterpart produces 10,000 film and video releases a year. It is these films that truly define the city where the entirety of the population, both literate and illiterate can escape from the heat, humidity and humanity for a short period.

For more on Mumbai, including the good, the bad and the ugly keep your eyes peeled for Part II of 

“Maximum Cities: An Exploration in 3 Stages” in next month’s issue of Prospere Magazine.