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Mumbai is like Manhattan. There's a certain pace, a social life and the thrill of a professional life.

Mumbai may not be my city. But it is my kind of city.

The fact is I like Mumbai less and less. My son says, 'Baba, let's go for a drive', and I tell him, 'Where's the fun of a drive in this place?' You get caught in a million traffic jams, and you spend time cooped in your car with all that mad cacophony around you.

Hindi films are so deceptive. I thought Mumbai was this big, grand, beautiful city with sea-facing flats.

I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it's the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else.

Mumbai is home, so there's no comparison. But then again, New York's a lot like Mumbai, which is why I choose to live there. It's fast, crowded (in a good way), the people are friendly and it's full of color and race, like Mumbai. Unfortunately, the traffic's also just as bad.

Mumbai's infectious. Once you start living in Mumbai, working in Mumbai, I don't think you can live anywhere else.

The thing about Mumbai is you go five yards and all of human existence is revealed. It's an incredible cavalcade of life, and I love that.

I was spending a lot of time in Mumbai after I met my husband, who is Indian, and while parts of the city were prospering like crazy, I couldn't quite make out how the new wealth had changed the prospects of the majority of city residents who lived in slums. So after a few years I stopped wondering and started reporting.

These are stories you hear... of people sitting in a mall and being spotted, and you think it will happen to you. And when you're fresh off the boat, and new in Bombay, you want those kind of things! They are magical fables. You want to, somewhere, be a part of it, something people will read about. But reality is different.