Packing up to leave forever, the family apartment in south Mumbai, was an emotional wrench, but also an eye-opener. In the boxes of photographs and letters I sorted out were memories of the city I grew up in. There is little resemblance between the Mumbai of today and the Bombay of my childhood.

I am among the last of the generation which can still recall a genteel, slower paced, less vainglorious city. I grew up on a leafy quiet street, lined with Victorian two-storey villas, where a lamplighter nightly illuminated the gas street lamps manually with a rod. On the walk to school, one passed the gracious Anglo-Gothic buildings of the Bombay High Court and Bombay University. For longer journeys, there was a tramline near the art deco Regal cinema. The tram moved so slowly you could jump on and off at any point. Churchgate station came up literally in front of my eyes in the Fifties. Then suburban trains started plying, disgorging, at intervals, thousands of commuters from the suburbs working in the then bustling Fort area.

By the early Sixties, the houses on my residential street, New Marine Lines, had been torn down to make way for ugly multi-storey office buildings on a road far too narrow to cope with the necessary infrastructure required for the sudden influx of people and cars. The changes came about abruptly due to a deft amendment tweaking municipal corporation rules concerning heights and floor area ratios in the zone. A new breed of builders changed the landscape forever. Then greedy politicians in partnerships with builders extended the boundaries of the island city, reclaiming large tracts of land at Nariman Point.

Every time I return to Mumbai, I witness fresh changes. In January, a six-lane highway bridge connecting Mumbai........

© Indian Express