Mumbai is a straight-line city,
where the people keep moving in spirals and circles - dizzingly upward spirals of immense opulence and downward spirals of crushing, dehumanizing poverty....or just circles of survival.

It is a city that will make you run very hard just to stay in the same place.

It is a city that works on a huge amount of grime and human grease.
It is life accelerated.

Mumbai sometimes scares me. But what scares me even more is when people say, "Three months in Mumbai, and then you can't live anywhere else. This city grows on you."

I always beleived that there is no city in the world that I can totally hate.
Do I hate Mumbai?

No, I am still struggling to come to terms with its intensity. With its accelereated densities.
How can I bring myself to hug this giant when its immensity and rawness still awe me?

I am suddenly, brutally shocked - like hitting the cold water of a pool flat with your chest - into the realization that there is no other city like Mumbai. There is nothing you can point to and say, "this is a bit like mumbai, with perhaps this and that changed, intensified, decreased, enlarged" No.....you can't compare Mumbai with anything. It is a concept in itself.

Perhaps, I need three months.

Till that time I shall continue to impress these pages with whatever Mumbai hits me with.
If these small images turn out to be the footprints of my reluctant love story with Mumbai then let it be so.