Reminiscing Mumbai

The Taj Hotel - in all its glory....then

Smoke billowing from the Taj Hotel during the siege

Watching the massacre of Mumbai unfolding on TV in real time recently, I was overcome by nostalgia about the city that I had visited several times in the late '90s on business trips.

The Gateway of India was built to commemorate the arrival in India, on 2 December 1911, of King George V and Queen Mary and was completed on 4 December, 1924

The Taj Hotel with the Gateway of India in the foreground - this was allegedly the entry point for millitant gunmen who arrived via the Arabian Sea

Mumbai is a city of contradictions - modern yet ancient, fabulously opulent yet achingly poor. I had stayed at both the Taj and Oberoi Hotels where gunmen held hostages and engaged in a shootout with military forces - which left about 170 people dead and more than 300 injured. The contrast between the opulence of the hotels and the poverty on the streets is like night and day. As one steps out of the grandeur of these hotels, one is hit by the poverty that many of its citizens live in - families sleeping on sidewalks and begging children tugging at your hand, refusing to go away until you give them something. But to give anything is equally dangerous - for one could be inviting a riot when scores of others would suddenly appear.

Seeing on TV the various familiar sites that were attacked - Victoria Terminus, Nariman House and Leopold Cafe - I felt a tinge of sadness about the human capacity to inflict such destruction and suffering upon fellow human beings, whose only crime was being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

The resilient human spirit would of course prevail - just like after 9/11 - and life has already returned to normal for Mumbaikers.

The Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus, formerly known as Victoria Terminus or VT for short, headquarters of the Central Railway, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site

Fashion Street, a huddle of little shops on Mahatma Gandhi Road - Mumbai is an exporter of ready-made garments and surpluses end up here. This place is a favorite haunt for fashion-conscious college students

Dhobi Ghat at Saat Rasta near Mahalaxmi Station. "Ghats" are "laundries" - row upon row of concrete wash pens, each fitted with its own flogging stone. The clothes are soaked in sudsy water, thrashed on the flogging stones, then tossed into huge vats of boiling starch and hung out to dry.

Marine Drive, a windswept promenade flanked by the sea and a row of art deco buildings. Marine Drive is looped between the concrete jungle of Nariman Point, Mumbai's Manhattan, and the leafy green slopes of Malabar Hill.