Mumbai, February 10, 2013
Yesterday morning I took a local train from VT (Victoria
Terminus, now Chhatrapati Shivaji) in the heart of Mumbai, all the way to
Panvel, the last stop of the Harbour Line in Navi Mumbai (New Mumbai.) Almost an hour and a half, following
the newest of the "tentacles" that Aldous Huxley mentions in his
brief but precise map-description of Bombay:
"From its island body, Bombay radiates long tentacles
of suburban squalor into the land."
When Huxley was writing in 1948, this Bombay as sea creature (like a squid or an
octopus) was dominated by its southern body, with a population of more than two
million inhabitants against only a few hundred thousands along the
tentacles. By contrast, today's Metropolitan
Mumbai has more than 18 million inhabitants, with the bulk of the growth happening
beyond Mumbai City proper. And the squalor has turned into the most diverse urban conditions, from slums
to exclusive high-rise developments.
And Mumbai keeps growing, its map dynamic and fluid, perhaps
best represented in the lines of a contemporary poet, Arundhathi Subramainam,
where she describes her city as a spool:
"City condemned to unspool
in an eternal hysteria
of lurid nylon dream."
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