![]() ![]() Then I moved to Bombay and lived there nine years. I was born in a city in extremis, Calcutta. I went back to look for that city with a simple question: Can you go home again? In the looking, I found the cities within me. “Where’re you from?” Searching for an answer-in Paris, in London, in Manhattan-I always fall back on “Bombay.” Somewhere, buried beneath the wreck of its current condition-one of urban catastrophe-is the city that has a tight claim on my heart, a beautiful city by the sea, an island-state of hope in a very old country. I speak like a Bombay boy it is how I am identified in Kanpur and Kansas. In all that time, I hadn’t lost my accent. Twenty-one years: enough time for a human being to be born, get an education, be eligible to drink, get married, drive, vote, go to war, and kill a man. I left Bombay in 1977 and came back twenty-one years later, when it had grown up to become Mumbai. ![]() ![]() Bombay is the future of urban civilization on the planet. With 14 million people, Bombay is the biggest city on the planet of a race of city dwellers. It is also the Urbs Prima in Mundis, at least in one area, the first test of the vitality of a city: the number of people living in it. Urbs Prima in Indis reads the plaque outside the Gateway of India. ![]() There will soon be more people living in the city of Bombay than on the continent of Australia. Excerpt from Suketu Mehta’s MAXIMUM CITY: Bombay Lost and Found ![]()
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