From Manhattan to Mumbai

When I first came up with the somewhat wild scheme of moving to India, people who'd lived here tried to describe the city to me.

They often compared it to New York City.

Walking down the streets of Mumbai these days, I wondered what these people had been smoking. There's no physical resemblance between the two. In another ten years that might change. Mumbai is being overtaken by skyscrapers.

Still, the physical geography is very different. Manhattan is nowhere near this crowded, nor (strange as it seems) does it feel so lived in. The architecture is different too. The roadside food vendors, of which there are several, sell very different snacks. In Mumbai it's fried potato cutlets and bhelpuri. In Manhattan, it's ice cream and those delicious halal pitas. The pitas were a staple of my diet when I lived in Chelsea, and the streetside food here is really popular with students.

But there is an important similarity between Mumbai and New York. For all that I talk about Mumbai's population, the vast majority of India's populace doesn't live in this city. But everyone has heard about it.

New York is the same way. Only 8 million people live there, which is a very small percent of the total US population.

These big cities occupy a larger space than their geography does. For people in small US towns, New York represents excitement, glamour and danger. New York's landmarks are the most recognizable in the world thanks to Hollywood movies and TV shows. For people who will never see it, New York is an incredibly exciting place. Just the fact that this city exists, this city where people from all over the world meet and mingle, where criminals rule the streets (this is the perception, anyway), where supermodels walk next to ordinary people, suggests that the US is a place of extreme possibility. New York draws young people and immigrants.

Mumbai has its overcrowding problem because it is the same way. This is where the movie stars live. The Gateway of India appears in hundreds of films, so does the Worli SeaFace. Ganglords and criminals live here, and all sorts of moral boundaries get crossed. This is why 17-year-old kids from the villages leave home and come here, knowing that they'll be sleeping on the street and scrounging for breakfast.

Sure, Delhi is where all the politicians are, but Mumbai is where everything happens. Just like New York City. Sure, DC may be where the government sits, and LA might be where the movie stars live, but New York City is where anything can happen.

This probably extends to the signature cities of every country. Buenos Aires is probably like this, and London and Cairo. Sure these cities are huge, but where they take up the most space is in the imagination.