MUMBAI  (BOMBAY)         

Mumbai unites all of India's languages, religions, ethnicitys, castles, and classes into one heaving, seething sizzler of a metropolis.  Rupee and dollar billionaires, film stars, models, and politicians flock to frolic at the city's hotels, discos, and restaurants.  But Mumbai is by no means all glamor and glitz.  The city is also home to more impoverished people than any other Indian city; the shantytown at Dharavi has become Asia's  (and perhaps the world's) largest slum.

Mumbai sprang from modest roots.  When the Portuguese acquired the islands in 1534, they called them Bom Bahia  ("Good Port"); subsequently, Mumbai entered the hands of Charles II of England as a part of Catherine of Braganza's dowry.  In 1687, Bombay became the capital of the East India Company's regional holdings. 

After India's independence, disputes between the Marathi and Gujarati-speaking populations ended in the partition of Bombay State into Maharashtra and Gujarat in 1960.  Even during conflict, the economy boomed, as it continues to do today.  In 1995, politicians gave the city a new official name - Mumbai, from Mumbadevi, the local incarnation of the goddess Durga.

Today, the city makes the most movies in India, and India makes far more movies than any other place on earth - a fact that earned the local film industry its nickname,  "Bollywood."  The manic mix of London double-deckers and bullock carts, sadhus and stockbrokers, and the perpetual motion of it all is enough to floor first-time visitors.  Mumbai defies stereotypes of and India filled with pot-bellied cows and ramshackle temples, though it has plenty of both.  Instead, the city forces travellers to face an explosive fusion of development and despair.