Since the East India Company merged seven islands into Bombay (now Mumbai), change has been constant-but now it is used as a weapon for displacement, disguised as development. Slums are erased overnight to make way for luxury towers priced in tens of crores. The working class is pushed to the margins-literally-and into distant housing projects with no infrastructure, transport or sanitation. Entire communities are uprooted while a new Mumbai is built for the privileged few, behind closed gates, inside glass walls. Sidharth Bhatia's Mumbai: A Million Islands is a piercing look at a city in the throes of relentless transformation. What is vanishing is not just space, but memory, history and the very fabric of a living city. Mumbai's famed spirit of survival is being tested like never before. Where the original seven islands had symbolized a synergy, today they're multiplying as fractures-social, spatial and economic-splitting the city into a million islands, each more isolated than the other.
