KHOJ Residency, India

Bombay has boulevards with shady arcades, pavements for the use of pedestrians, night time streets where one can wander from food stall to bar to restaurant. Unremarkable, perhaps, unless you've been spending a month in Delhi. There is dirt, but this seems like functional dirt from the intensive use of a very high density environment, an equilibrium between waste and cleaning, not the pointless squalor of despair. And of course Bombay still has whole families living on the street. No way of knowing if they'd prefer to be in Delhi. But there's a kind of economic apartheid there that seems to be lacking in Bombay, where the city itself means that everyone has to rub along. At TIFR, the Tata institute for Fundamental Research which was the reason for my visit, most of the scientists seem to travel on the local buses and trains. No way would their counterparts consider doing so in Delhi. The inhabitants of Bombay identify themselves as belonging to the city, whereas in Delhi everyone tells you how many hours it takes to get to their village on the bus.