City of Bombs

The title, for those bibliophiles out there, of course hails from Salman Rushdie's fantastic Midnight's Children.

The first thing I noticed about Mumbai is that it is perhaps the most crowded city I have ever been to. The population density must be through the roof.

The second thing I noticed the inequality. The desperately poor and fabulously wealthy quite literally live side-by-side, sort of like the elite and favelas of Brazil. (Does anyone know what the Gini Coefficient for Mumbai is vis-a-vis Rio?)

My hosts both here and in Ahmedabad suggested that if I could do only two things in Mumbai, it would be to visit the Dharva slums (pictured below) to see the crushing poverty, and then later go to the Hard Rock Cafe, so see wealthy Indians drop 10,000 Rs. ($220) in a single night.

So if nothing else, their comments tell me that locals are very cognizant that the inequality in the city is extreme.

What is interesting is that in the slums Hindu shrines, Christian temples, and Muslim mosques are nearly on top of each other. In addition, I picked up people speaking a variety of dialects from different regions of the country, not just Hindi.

I am constantly struck at how diverse India is. It's not so much a country as a bunch of little countries rolled into one. Winston Churchill was certainly right when he said that India was not so much a country but as a geographic term.

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I started to write the rest of this post on India's massive diversity and a spat between China and India over the summer. You can read about it here.

My post expanded into a long essay on the subject, so I decided to scrap it. But my thoughts in a nutshell: the Chinese think tank's analysis, besides being incredibly ironic, is uncreative and unintelligent.

I'll leave it at that for now. Longer post later.