Word: mayanagri
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...migrants from India's poor states, the metropolis is known as Mayanagri, the City of Dreams. To its slums come people from India's villages, hitching rides and dodging train fares, prepared to sell spicy peanuts at traffic lights for a few cents a day and pay $1 a month to live in a tin hut. For some of them, the principal opportunity the city offers is a life of crime--running bootlegging operations or gambling dens--or renting out the hovels in which millions of Bombay's inhabitants live. Just as for Bombay's gilded élite, the city...
...only 3,000 km of freeway, and finding enough water to drink is an annual battle for tens of millions. (Oh, and there are no real-life plans for an Indian lunar landing.) There's a handy Hindu concept to explain these paradoxes. Maya means wonder, as in Mayanagri (city of dreams), the Hindi nickname for Bombay. It also denotes a willful fantasy - of the kind, for example, that would have a U.S. President last week expressing his "joy" at seeing the new India while in Delhi, a city only half-supplied with sewers. Gandhi was once asked what...
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