Glittering Mumbai by night

One of the most enduring clichés about flying into Mumbai is about the slums that overwhelm you and the bums that are all around them.

The best (worst?) description is in VS Naipaul’s very tired exposition—India: a Million Mutinies Now.

A tired beginning to a tired book on India. Now slums, they exist in every big city and the other thing we all have, so what’s to say about them anymore? Besides, everyone knows that the best way to fly into Mumbai is on a night flight.

As you approach the metropolis, having barely digested what the pilot has told you about atmospheric pressure and axis to the earth and barometers and probably even barium meals, you are overwhelmed by the twinkling down below you.

Mumbai does this better than most other Indian cities because it never has power cuts.

With due apologies to those who do suffer from load-shedding, power cuts and the vagaries of the Maharashtra State Electricity Board, I am limiting my description of Mumbai by night to those metropolitan areas that fall within the municipal corporation and are serviced by companies other than MSEB.

Anyway, it’s still a fabulous explosion of lights that greets you as the plane banks and then prepares to land.

Sometimes, you get the idea of the dark sea beyond and this galaxy of light alongside it—like the Milky Way reflected on land, if one has to get poetic about it.

Flying over Delhi at night is a bit like staring at the head of a balding man—bits of light, bits of intense darkness where no hair has been seen for a very long time.

There was a time when Sharad Pawar compared Mumbai’s international airport to a bus station. Much newsprint—this was in the days before the invasion of the TV newswallahs—was expended on his comment, but the airport, sadly, did not look much different after that. Mumbai’s domestic airport, on the other hand, was always quite swish.

People all over India used to dress up when they went to see people off, fly or receive people, but in Mumbai you had to put in that extra effort.

Now we’re blasé about flying—and rightly so—but I am happy to report that Delhi airport looks and feels like a bus station and Mumbai is still swish.