Mumbai, Financial capital in Maharashtra, India
Mumbai stretches across roughly 603 square kilometers between the Arabian Sea and Thane Creek and is India's most populous city, home to over 20 million people in a dense urban fabric of skyscrapers, colonial buildings, slums and wide port facilities along the western shore. The peninsula continues to grow northward onto the mainland, with new suburbs spreading to the edges of neighboring districts and making the metropolitan area one of the world's largest.
Originally seven separate islands under Maratha and Sultanate rule, the territories were seized by the Portuguese in 1534 before passing to England through a marriage alliance, whereupon the East India Company began wide land reclamation projects starting in 1668. These works gradually joined the islands through filled earth and continued into the twentieth century, creating the peninsula shape visible today.
As home to Bollywood, the world's largest film industry by output, the city shapes popular culture across South Asia through Hindi cinema that blends tradition with modern themes. Visitors notice this cultural force in the many studios, cinemas and billboards that present actors as icons and dominate daily conversation on the street.
Suburban rail lines run from 4 AM to 1 AM with trains every few minutes during peak hours, and separate ladies' compartments are available throughout the network. Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport sits 28 kilometers north of the city center and connects both domestic and international destinations.
The Dabbawalas system has delivered roughly 200,000 homemade lunches daily from suburbs to offices since 1890 with an error rate of only one mistake per 16 million deliveries, documented through Six Sigma certification and Harvard case studies. These carriers organize themselves into teams that use color-coded marks on metal containers to coordinate complex routes across the city without digital technology.
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