soaps remain popular all over Asia. Alongside US imports, Hindu pop too has carved out a sizeable niche among the jeunesse dorée, whose squandering of excessive pocket money on whatever international fashion marques they can get their hands on has already attracted the mocking attention of scathing lead columnists. Even the outsize billboards target the ample financial resources of the mobile phone generation, proclaiming the virtues of »Bollywood ringtones«. A lightness of being, manifestly anything but unbearable, has infected those twentysomethings that issue from the wealthier classes. In Mumbai, it is evident not only in the restaurants, bars and discotheques of the elegant, century-old Taj Mahal Palace.
Mumbai’s rise to fame began with the global cotton boom over 250 years ago. Cotton, grown far and wide around the city, was shipped to England from India’s largest port – naturally at the expense and for the account of the British East India Company, whose local governors periodically doubled as vice-regents as colonialism ran its course. More so even than Mumbai, Kolkata has colonial history to thank for its prominence. After the East India Company, long the British crown’s de facto administrator in India, set up its headquarters in Kalikata in 1757, it wasn’t long before what had been a sleepy village, now renamed Calcutta, blossomed to become India’s capital c c m a g # 1 / 2 01 3
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