Portugal 1 Mumbai 0

There is growing consensus that nothing can be done with Mumbai. With its bloated population and flotsam infrastructure, the commercial capital of India is in crumbles.

The Portuguese were visionaries. After appropriating the seven islands that make up present-day Mumbai from Bahadur Shah of Gujarat in 1534, they handed the archipelago over to England’s Charles II in 1661 as dowry for his wife Catherine de Braganza. King Charles, in turn, leased ‘Bom-baia’ (good bay in Portuguese) to the East India Company for the sum of £ 10 a year. As it became the headquarters of the Bombay Presidency under British rule, the city started to gear up for modernity. Civil engineering projects merged the islands into one organic mass, the first railway track connecting Bombay and Thane was set up in 1853, and the city became the second largest in India (after Calcutta) by 1906.

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Somewhere down the line, however, despite the best efforts of writers Salman Rushdie and, of late, Suketu Mehta, things started to happen (read: things started to fall apart). Today, as foreign news magazines splash mandatory photos of the Queen’s Necklace and the blurring traffic on Marine Drive to symbolise the economic dynamism of 21st century India, we are forced to wonder whether a city that turns Atlantis each year deserves the epithet ‘Maximum City’.

There is growing consensus that nothing can be done with Mumbai. With its bloated population and flotsam infrastructure, the commercial capital of India is in crumbles. Its citizens face a choice: bemoan the fate of being stranded in the incessant rains, or grin and bear it. The latter can be palmed off as ‘the indomitable spirit of Mumbaikars’. We would like to think Mumbai’s fate as one that the Portuguese cleverly and neatly sidestepped.