It has been almost 17 years since I first heard of the Bombay Eye popping up in our island city. Apparently, the idea first occurred to someone in 2008, when the BMC announced plans to construct a local version of London’s Millennium Wheel. A senior employee of that august institution must have been visiting the UK on a taxpayer-funded holiday (also known as a fact-finding mission) and returned thrilled with the idea of a similar project appearing on these shores.

Like everyone in Bombay, I knew the project’s viability depended less upon what value it could provide than on what a contractor could charge to have it built. History has taught us all that zeroes are important when it comes to infrastructure in this city: the bigger the number of zeroes, the more interested the BMC gets. What I was surprised by, however, was that no committee was announced to debate whether it shouldn’t have another name. Why the Bombay Eye, I wondered, given how most things in Maharashtra are named after people who died 300 years ago, or politicians who died in our recent past. Still, in a burst of optimism, I assumed the BMC had decided to surprise us all by choosing common sense over sycophancy. My optimism didn’t last.