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Recommend Don't hate Mumbai because it's beautiful (Email)

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OP-ED: "What They Hate About Mumbai," by Suketu Mehta, New York Times, 29 November 2008.
Good piece.
Just as cinema is a mass dream of the audience, Mumbai is a mass dream of the peoples of South Asia. Bollywood movies are the most popular form of entertainment across the subcontinent. Through them, every Pakistani and Bangladeshi is familiar with the wedding-cake architecture of the Taj and the arc of the Gateway of India.
Besides staying at the Taj in 2001, when I was there for the International Fleet Review, I attended a concert at the Gateway (military bands). The truer gist:
Why do they go after Mumbai? There's something about this island-state that appalls religious extremists, Hindus and Muslims alike. Perhaps because Mumbai stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness.
We think of globalization = Westernization = Americanizaton, but in South Asia, it equals Mumbaization. Same essential difference. The decadent city is hated opposite of the pristine, romanticized past dream of the countryside. This is where Occidentalism originates, oddly enough, in the West: when the cities take off thanks to industrialization.


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