Mumbai's Mighty Cash In on a Real Estate Boom
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"In Mumbai, property is destiny," the novelist Vikram Chandra, author of the huge fictional investigation into the city's hidden vortexes of power "Sacred Games," once said to me.
Of course, every one of the 20 million or so denizens of the space-starved Indian financial capital knows and feels (and dreams) this truth, but the city's extortionate real estate prices and lamentable urban planning mean that more than half of its industrious population lives and suffers in slums, while hundreds of thousands of middle-class people expend their energies on debilitating journeys on jam-packed trains and buses from homes in the distant suburbs.