I made a brief, official visit to Mumbai over the past week end – a city that I have been visiting off and on since the early 60s and where I lived for 5 years in the 80s.  And the sight of the local  cab has not changed much since then – the  black and yellow Fiat being as iconic and symbolic of the city as the orange Ambassadors of Kolkota or even the yellow cabs of New York.  In India, we have this luxury of hailing down cruising, ubiquitously available cabs (a common scene in New York based movies)  only Mumbai and Kolkota.

On the Saturday evening I walked through familiar streets of Dadar/ Matunga with no specific agenda, visited the temple and  flavored the market (less bustling and congested than as I remember it from 2 decades ago). When I decided that I should head back to the…