Globe Trekker: Mumbai City Guide

This entertaining and informative Globe Trekker travelogue takes viewers on a guided tour of India's most populous city. Full of surprises and contradictions, Mumbai (formerly Bombay) is home to numerous billionaires and millionaires, serves as the center for the nation's wildly popular “Bollywood” films, and has a deep harbor that fuels a massive fishing industry. But it is also the site of one of the world's biggest and most famous slums—although here, too, not everything is what it seems on the surface. Hosted by the engaging and helpfully tall Zay Harding (one never loses sight of him in a crowd), the tour begins in Bandra, where everyone seems agog over the presence of movie studios and occasional sightings of big stars. Next comes Dharavi, the sprawling, poverty-stricken community where Slumdog Millionaire was filmed. With its garbage-strewn streets, Dharavi looks like a human disaster, but Harding gets a closer view of areas of concentrated industry, from mechanized garment-making to recycling. A lively sequence at Sassoon Docks, home of the city's biggest fish market, is followed by excursions to a 16th-century fort, a gigantic open-air laundromat (where workers wash customer clothes in pools of water), and the archaeological site of Ellora, where excavation has revealed ancient architecture. Finally, Harding visits with the great-grandson of Mahatma Gandhi in the house where Gandhi lived and organized against British colonial rule for many years. Mumbai City Guide also shows viewers the physical legacy of centuries of British and Portuguese colonization—grand buildings and churches that are a reminder of the nation's long fight for independence. Highly recommended. Aud: P. (T. Keogh)