Mumbai is to India what New York is to the world

After moving to a new city, at what point does one start calling it home? Almost a year after being in Mumbai, I still found myself telling people that I'm from Delhi.

Then I met a poet who told me that there was no way I was ever going to give up my Delhi identity. “That's the only thing that reminds you of old bonds,” he told me.
Mumbai is to India what New York is to the world. “And when you are in New York, you are always a New Yorker from somewhere."

Over the last one year, I have met countless young people who have migrated to the city following their dreams. Some are software professionals, others want to make pots of money in the stock market, while some have dreams of making it big in the film industry. And they love it. They like the fact that the city is so impersonal and yet personal, all at once. “It's a city for the outsider,” I’m told repeatedly. During the last one year, I have reluctantly started calling Mumbai my home.

My neighbours - a 70-year-old maid, a manager at the local South Indian restaurant and a local bartender at a Bandra permit room all make me feel at home. Before I came here, I thought Mumbai makes a migrant successful. Now I have changed my view. It’s the migrant that makes cosmopolitan Mumbai, a success. Right from the time one exits from the airport and gets into  a cab (driven always by someone from the three cities of Varanasi, Pratapgarh and Allahabad) to the time one settles down as a tenant in a house owned by another migrant, to the time one begins frequenting a food joint run by a Shetty from Mangalore, Mumbai comes across as a strange amalgamation of lives and dreams. The last stop for those afflicted with wanderlust, because not everyone who wanders is lost.