Bombay/Mumbai | Mumbai/Bombay

I found a great quote today: “A businessman might go to Mumbai to hold a meeting, but he would go to Bombay to hold a lover.” That’s the best explanation I’ve found for the difference in the semantic choices of overly conscientious foreigners and comfortable locals.

Bombay is a city of stepped levels: intermittent skyscrapers; endless highrises atop rolling hills; groves of flowering trees block the street view. Seas of slums like boxes stacked on boxes; a haphazard adobe of blue tarps, brick, and corrugated metals held together through sheer will. Minute shops line the streets, hawking cell minutes and soda, cloth, furniture, samosas, haircuts. Chaiwallas and bananawallas and pantswallas and all the other wallas cart their wares. Below it all, the fish women and flower women squat with their baskets. The ocean is brown with refuse and feces; the mangroves impossibly tangled with colorful garbage. The roads are filthy and the thought of monsoon flooding terrifies me. Everywhere hoards of people toil, eat, honk, laugh, chat, sleep, shit, buy, and sell. It’s a lot like New York. But the magnitude of the income and education gap is constantly palpable, caste system remnants visible always, a potential deadweight to India’s rapid ascent.

water source for street food vendors

Until August, I am lucky enough to be a guest member of a powerhouse social enterprise team bent on improving the lives of India’s rural and peri-urban poor through access to clean water. Wello’s innovative tool, the WaterWheel, is in its third cocreated design iteration and ready for production. My project involves evaluating end user impact to fully develop Wello’s value proposition, as well as financial scenario planning to define the business model. Our office space is entirely covered in Post-Its. 

We will spend June here in Mumbai, engaging with partners, coordinating logistics, and studying urban water use habits. The entrepreneurial atmosphere ensures fresh questions and challenges on a daily basis, something I missed during my brief foray into corporate life last summer. Risk is allowed, creativity is encouraged, MBA lessons are put to good use. And my daily breakfast consists of papaya, pineapple, mango, watermelon, pomegranate, banana, and yogurt, keeping a smile on my face. Lunch is panipuri, paneer, strangely addictive jeera crackers, and all the fresh juice I could ask for.


In July we head to Rajasthan to work in the field, connecting with our target market and gathering baseline data. While I look forward to lake palaces, camels, and riotously dyed saris, I am not entirely ready to abandon my cityscape. Three weeks ago, I came to Mumbai. I’m still discovering Bombay.