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Promenade along Marine Drive.
(Photo: Duncan McKenzie/Getty Images) |
Mumbai is to India what New York is to the United States: its most populous city and its financial capital, a bastion of higher education and cosmopolitan thinking, a mosaic of diverse �ethnicities and religions. Mumbai endured its own 9/11�dubbed 26/11�and emotions still run raw. (That a Pakistani court just released on bail one of the Lashkar-e-Taiba militants accused of puppeteering the devastating 2008 attack that left more than 160 people dead doesn’t help.) This is a city that lives with�and off�its one percent, for whom India’s spectacular economic growth has spurred a literal race to the top: When completed next year, the Financial District’s 117-story World One Tower will be the tallest residential building on Earth�never mind that 41 percent of Mumbaikars still scrape by in slums. The city’s most vulnerable have been largely ignored�consider the 13 years it took for Bollywood megastar Salman Khan to be convicted of killing a homeless man in a hit-and-run. Overpopulation, imploding infrastructure, the continued oppression of women, and the recent recriminalization of gay sex are serious problems. And yet the locals are undeniably hopeful for a sustainable middle-class existence (and the schools and accessible culture that come with it). By all accounts, the city is getting there.