‘The most telling image of Mumbai is BEST’: Kiran Nagarkar’s ode to the city’s public buses

We perceive and understand ourselves, our homes and our cities by the ways in which outsiders see us. This is all the more so, if, as Edward Said and his parroting acolytes on the subcontinent will tell you, the country has had the misfortune (and if I may interpolate, also on some occasions the good fortune) to have been a colony of some big power.

The iconic images of Mumbai for foreigners, and through their eyes for us inhabitants, are many: the local trains with thousands of commuters crammed in with a few dozen falling out every day; the chawls; the immersion of the clay images of Ganapati at Chowpati beach; the Dharavi slums; the Gateway of India; and the Hobson-Jobson mutation performed by the British on the Portuguese name for Mumbai which is even today common currency, Bombay.

For me, the most telling image of Mumbai is another gift from the British: the BEST bus service. The history of Mumbai (and perhaps it’s tragic, dead-end future too) could be written by studying the growth of the BEST and its routes.

In the beginning was the BEST double-decker. There were no wide-bodied, aggressive, get-the-f—out-of-my-way, single-decker buses in my childhood as there were no...

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