Book Launch: An Evening with Sidharth Bhatia & Naresh Fernandes at the Unveiling of 'Mumbai: A Million Islands'

An evening dedicated to Mumbai

When founder-editor of The Wire, Sidharth Bhatia and Naresh Fernandes, editor of Scroll, come together to unveil a book, expect plenty of great conversations and insightful discussions about Mumbai. The book in question is Sidharth's latest offering to the literary world, Mumbai: A Million Islands. The launch took place at The Asiatic Society of Mumbai's majestic Durbar Hall.

It was a packed house, with no room to stand or sit. People came in droves. It was impossible to spot an empty seat around 6 pm, when the event was about to begin. That's the kind of crowd Sidharth draws, and with Naresh joining in, the numbers were bound to double. However, the lucky few who found a seat or even a place to stand, ended up being part of a heart-warming, insightful discussion on Sidharth's beloved city, Mumbai.

Mumbai: A Million Islands

In James Crabtree's words, Mumbai: A Million Islands is "a tender love letter to a disappearing city, written with the intimacy of someone who wants its stories told".

For Udayan Mitra, Executive Publisher, HarperCollins India, the book is full of memorable insights. "This is a book that will be an essential read for anyone interested in the making of present-day Mumbai," he revealed.

If its author, Sidharth Bhatia has to be quoted, the book offers a "piercing look at a city in the throes of relentless transformation. What's vanishing is not just space, but memory, history and the very fabric of a living city."

Sidharth knows Mumbai, at its heart, and that's what makes this book so authentic and the discussion so insightful. "When he writes about the city, he writes with authority. He also writes with a certain fluency that we don't encounter that much these days," said Udayan.

How positive is the story of Mumbai's development?

"I am staying somewhere close to the airport, and it used to take me two hours to get here, around this time of the day. Now, it takes me 45 minutes thanks to the flyovers, underpasses and so on. But how positive is this story of this development? It has enhanced efficiency in some ways, but has it been completely inclusive? Is the Mumbaikar on the street, or in their homes, happy with the city we live in?" asked Udayan, as he threw the floor open for discussion with the 'attraction' of the evening, Sidharth and Naresh, taking centerstage.

A few years ago, a three-storey building next to Sidharth's house suddenly vanished behind blue tin sheets. Construction started. Dust, noise and pollution followed. The street remained the same. Its length and ethos were exactly the same. But something changed, and as time went on Sidharth started seeing these sights everywhere.

"There used to be slum pockets somewhere, they vanished. There used to be people living in old buildings, they disappeared. Somewhere this thought hit me that where are these people going. I went a saw a home for displaced people somewhere in the deepest and if I may say so, the darkest places. Darkest because there was no hospital, or transportation or school. Industrial pollution is so high at some of these places that people were coughing away, every night, every day," Sidharth informed the audience, as he spoke about the initial thread that got him to write the book. For him, the city is becoming glittering, but something on the basic level is seeming off.

The new islands that Sidharth explores in his book

The original seven islands, which had symbolised coming together, now have multiplied metaphorically into a million islands, each more segregated, exclusive, and isolated than the last.

“As a native of this city, I have seen it constantly change over the years. Of late, however, I have observed the sheer force of its metamorphosis with some alarm. My endeavour in this book is to map this rapid transformation and to see what the human cost of that is. I think it will strike a chord with not just the citizens of Mumbai but also with those in other cities where similar changes are taking place," shared Sidharth.

"I was very clear that this is not going to be a story where I said that everything is sad and terrible. I wanted to show the city's background, where we have come from, where we have landed and where we are headed, and how the city has emerged. Many of my discoveries of this city is because I was in touch with NGOs," he added.

What the city has gained, what got left behind in the bargain

The evening threw light on how the port — where Bombay began, when the East India Company saw possibility in the bay — is soon going to get transformed. The entire belt of warehouses and slums in the port area are going to get uprooted for another set of luxury, sea-facing apartments.

The audience got insights about how Marine Drive, for the first time in the city's history, moved its view from the east to the west, why being 'cosmopolitan' is not such a good thing in some parts of Mumbai, what it means to be a 'legal' resident of a city, how Mumbai is becoming very exclusive, and why the new city that's emerging is losing all its connection with the street.

According to Sidharth, Mumbai: A Million Islands is a reporter's book. "I have gone and trudged all over the city — I sometimes still like to call it Bombay — to ask people about their lives. This is a story about their lives. This is not me expressing my opinion; this is me asking them, how do you live," he revealed.

Published on: Sunday, December 07, 2025, 05:00 PM IST