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To migrants from India's poor states, the metropolis is known as Mayanagri, the City of Dreams. To its slums come people from India's villages, hitching rides and dodging train fares, prepared to sell spicy peanuts at traffic lights for a few cents a day and pay $1 a month to live in a tin hut. For some of them, the principal opportunity the city offers is a life of crime--running bootlegging operations or gambling dens--or renting out the hovels in which millions of Bombay's inhabitants live. Just as for Bombay's gilded élite, the city is the place to be. "I came from nothing," says a Bombay gangster who grew up in Bihar, India's poorest state and owns 30,000 huts in four slums. "Now I have money, phones, cars, houses, a wife and two girlfriends. If you were me, you'd love Bombay too."
That not to say it's easy to love. If you judge Bombay by governance, it sounds as though the city is falling apart. In a calamity last July that was mercifully forgotten with the advent of Hurricane Katrina weeks later, heavy monsoon rains flooded Bombay for a week as the city's 150-year-old drains and sewers collapsed. At least 435 people died. The infrastructure bears other scars of neglect. In the city's small and ancient stock of trains, each is crammed with an average of 4,500 people, although most have a capacity of 1,750. As a result, passenger groups say, an astonishing 3,500 travelers die every year on the tracks, hundreds simply falling from the trains. City rent controls have kept the price of its swankiest apartments almost unchanged since 1940, encouraging landlords to let them crumble--as several blocks do, fatally, every year. Visitors to the most prestigious offices in the country in south Bombay run a gauntlet of homeless people outside. Movie director Shekhar Kapur, who returned after years in London and Los Angeles, says living in Bombay means confronting the class divide daily: "This must be one of the few places on earth where the rich try to work off a few pounds in the gym, step outside and are confronted by a barefoot child of skin and bones begging for something to eat."
Those urban extremes can be hard to take, but locals pride themselves on their pluck and self-reliance. When the floods hit last year, rescue workers were nowhere to be seen, but shanty dwellers sheltered businessmen, slum children rescued film stars, and untouchables saved holy men. "There was a feeling that went through people," says film producer and director Mahesh Bhatt, who is suing the city for its alleged mishandling of the crisis. "We realized no one was going to descend from the heavens to solve our problems, and we were going to have to do it ourselves." The same is true of Bombay's economy. "On the face of it, the city's screwed," says wine impresario Samant. "Look at the traffic, the bureaucracy, the sewage, so much poverty next to so much money. You'd think the place would erupt." Yet look at how nimbly the city negotiates those obstacles, he says. "There's no better place to be in business right now."