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Here are a few statistics from Suketu Mehta's stunning new book, Maximum City. In some parts of Bombay, you can find 1 million people in a single square mile. Two million of the city's residents lack access to latrines, and the air has 10 times the maximum permissible levels of lead (to breathe it in, as 5 million or more living on the streets do every second, is equivalent to smoking 2 1/2 packs of cigarettes a day). An unusually large number of criminals are either shot in "encounters" or tortured to death in detention in Bombay; four...
...This all has resonance because Bombay, Mehta says, will be the largest city in the world 11 years from now; what happens there is just a more dramatic instance of what happens in Jakarta and Bangkok and La Paz. And the only people maintaining standards and facilities in this Jacobean society are, almost inevitably, members of the criminal underworld, who run things more efficiently than do their government counterparts. Even judges turn to mobsters for help. "Our motto," a criminal overlord tells Mehta, "is insaaniyat, humanity." When an ordinary, law-abiding citizen comes to Bombay from elsewhere, Mehta shows...
...DIED. RAJA RAMANNA, 79, scientist regarded as the father of India's nuclear-weapons program; in Bombay. Ramanna was head of Bombay's Bhabha Atomic Research Center in 1974 when the facility designed and detonated the country's first nuclear device in the Rajasthan desert; he was later appointed scientific adviser to the Defense Ministry and head of the Department of Atomic Energy. A skilled pianist and author of a book on music theory, he once reportedly declined an offer from Saddam Hussein to help Iraq develop its own nuclear program...
...London's West End last week hauling a wagonload of expectations. This is, after all, Andrew Lloyd Webber's homecoming. Eighteen years after The Phantom of the Opera, after his American odysseys (Sunset Boulevard and Whistle Down the Wind), his Irish adventure (The Beautiful Game) and his Indian idyll (Bombay Dreams, which he produced), the composer has at last found an English gothic tale with which he might be able to harness the spooky power - not to mention the box-office returns - of Phantom. Or so his followers hoped. And it's easy to see why Lloyd Webber fans thought...
...lure the crowd that completes the picture.) This is why restaurants are now second only to museums as the places where designers get to take their most audacious ideas out to play. In London and Milan, along the Pacific Rim, in Miami and Los Angeles and even Bombay, restaurants are the hot design laboratories...