Donald Trump's latest ego trip breaks ground in Mumbai

[Recursion]

The Germans are separated from the Gauls by the Rhine; from the Dacians by mutual loathing
-- Tacitus

So, much like Manhattan, Mumbai is historically separated into an east and west side. Only instead of a park dividing them, there are two sets of parallel railroad tracks.

The west side is the Bombay that is justly famous to the world: Bollywood, fashion, music, beaches, etc. The part of town where you can run into Shah Rukh Khan or Madhuri Dixit at a juice stand. Cosmopolitan, urbane, liberal, and a haven of the 1% (which, if you're an American there, includes you) and the people who work for them.

The east side is the seedier part of Mumbai, the old port town. It's where slums like Dongri and Dharavi are. It's where Sanju Baba ran guns and explosives, and Davu Bhai ran a criminal enterprise so efficient that for years he never even threatened violence; he just left his well-known white cane leaning up against store fronts or residences, at which point you cleared out by the next morning. Some of this stuff made Cosa Nostra look like Modern Family.

In between the two halves of the city, between the two tracks, is a kind of no-man's land where I live, an area with an interesting connection to US history: the old mills.

Once Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclomation, Victoria had no choice but to fully accept the embargo of the Confederacy, so the Empire needed to look for new sources for cotton. Dinshaw Maneckji Petit saw an opportunity, and seized it. He bought up all the empty land in central Bombay and built mills; the area soon became the most productive part of the empire. They remained centrally important even after independence, only faltering when a strike in the 1980s led the factories to relocate to Bangladesh and Indonesia.

There have been all sorts of proposed redevelopments of this area. One is the apartment building I live in (the one the monkeys tried to take over, if you recall). There are also malls, hospitals, women's shelter's, public housing, and city office space. Nobody has quite come up with a one-size fits all approach to redeveloping the mills, and maybe nobody should.

But one size that fits none, that is absolutely absurd, is Trump's planned ego tower, "The Park". It's been de facto under construction for a while, but officially they just "broke ground" today with Aishwarya Bachchan (daughter of the famous actor, and herself a fairly famous actress, and a future tenant) presiding.

The tower will be 800 feet tall in an area where the average building height is 400 feet. And yet it will have lower residential density than any of the surrounding developments. The local developer (the Lodha group) cleared the contract locally with the promise that they would put a pedestrian bridge over the Western Rail Line between Parel and Mahalaxmi in return. I leave it to you to guess how soon that will happen.

The building will be an eyesore, an affront to the millions (literally) of Mumbaikars who need affordable housing, and still has not submitted its transit effect estimate to the city.

Anyways, just wanted to gripe...