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. 'Where're you from?' Searching for an answer - in Paris, in London, in Manhattan - I always fall back on 'Bombay'. 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 civilisation on the planet. With fourteen 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.
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