Let's hit the rewind button to the late 1930s and ’40s when Marine Drive wasn’t the bustling area that it’s now become. Let’s peek in through some of the windows in those Art Deco buildings to find out who lived there. What do you see? A cross-section of communities who had the wealth to buy sea-facing properties there, and who embodied the cosmopolitan nature that the city possesses till date.

It’s those people that journalist Siddharth Bhatia will talk about at a session this week, titled The Social Structure of Early Marine Drive and organised by The Museum Society of Mumbai. “I will not talk about the brick-and-mortar aspect of the place at all. I will instead talk about how the people who first moved in there found the place both fascinating and also alienating, because they were used to living in older structures and not the flats that had been built there,” Bhatia tells us, highlighting how these living conditions were an anomaly in that era.