I avoid getting into arguments about which Indian city is best. They pop up now and again whenever I visit another place and are inadvertently put forth by people who don’t live in Bombay. I avoid these arguments because there isn’t one. To spend more than a year in Bombay is to know the answer to that question and laugh at anyone naïve enough to suggest otherwise.

My reason for avoiding that argument has changed over the past couple of years though. It is now something I step away from because every trip I make to this city leaves me with a deepening sense of despair. It isn’t just the unending traffic jams or crumbling infrastructure; it’s the things that crop up to enforce some bureaucrat’s version of modernity that rankle the most.