India · Chapter 03 · City and work
मुंबईMumbai
Bombay in the archives.
Mumbai in motion.
We left the bags and went straight to the waterfront. The next day, the hotel became our base for work as well as rest.
Enter the city ↓Opening scene
The bags were still closed.
The city was already open.
Mumbai did not arrive quietly. It came through the airport doors, the movement around us, and the immediate feeling that sitting still would be the wrong response.
This was our first time in Mumbai—the city many people still remember as Bombay. We had barely arrived when curiosity took over. We left our luggage at Holiday Inn Mumbai, kept only what we needed for the afternoon, and ordered an Uber toward South Mumbai.
There was no complicated first-day plan. We wanted one clear introduction: the historic waterfront at Colaba, where the Gateway of India faces the harbour and the Taj Mahal Palace stands across the plaza. Sometimes a city gives you a logical place to begin.
The stay · first impression
Holiday Inn began as our reset point. The next day, it became the story.
For those first hours, the hotel simply held our luggage while we met the city. By the following morning, it had become a working base for meetings, Zoom calls, meals, and the practical work of preparing a new product portfolio for the India market. Continue to the workday ↓
Mumbai · Bombay · a city shaped by the sea
Two names hold different parts of the story.
“Bombay” belongs to the city’s colonial record and remains familiar in older institutions, family memories, films, books, and conversations. “Mumbai” is the city’s official name today, rooted in Mumbadevi and the cultural identity of Maharashtra.
Long before either name carried global weight, the area was an archipelago of seven islands associated with Koli fishing communities. Portuguese and then British rule changed its political identity; land reclamation gradually joined the islands and helped turn the natural harbour into a major port.
Colaba · Apollo Bunder
Our first landmark was built to stage an arrival.
We stepped onto the open plaza and immediately understood why the Gateway of India works as Mumbai’s ceremonial front door. The stone arch has scale, but the experience around it is wonderfully democratic: families, travellers, photographers, vendors, harbour boats, and people simply standing still to take it all in.
Across the plaza · The Taj Mahal Palace
The hotel was there first.
From the Gateway, we turned around and met another Mumbai icon. The Taj Mahal Palace is not simply a luxurious backdrop. It is part of the waterfront’s visual memory—its red dome, arched windows, and layered façade holding the corner with remarkable confidence.
What surprised us was the timeline. The hotel opened in 1903, more than two decades before the Gateway was completed. The relationship looks inevitable today, but the Taj had already been welcoming travellers while the monument opposite it was still an idea.
Next stop · Colaba Causeway
After the monuments,
lunch inside another landmark.
From the waterfront, we moved into the streets of Colaba with one destination in mind: Leopold Café. This time the landmark was not something to stand in front of. It was somewhere to sit down, order lunch, and let Mumbai gather around our table.
An Irani café · established 1871
Before it became an icon, it kept changing with the city.
Leopold traces its beginning to 1871. Historical accounts describe a business that started as a wholesale cooking-oil store and, over the years, also operated as a store, pharmacy, and restaurant. Its long life is not a story of standing still; it is a story of adapting.
The café also belongs to the wider history of Mumbai’s Irani cafés, opened by Zoroastrian migrants from Iran in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These approachable, mixed social spaces became part of the city’s everyday rhythm—places where different kinds of people could share the same room and table.
Editorial archive · 2007 to today
Three photographs.
One continuing life.
The images do more than prove that Leopold has endured. Together, they show an everyday dining room before 2008, the physical memory left immediately afterward, and the living café that still meets Colaba Causeway today.
What we ordered · what we remember
A cold Kingfisher, charred chicken, warm bread—and finally, time to sit.
The beer arrived first, cold enough to mark a clean break from the heat and movement outside. Then came the food: smoky chicken with crisp, charred edges, flatbread, sliced onions, and bright green chutney. It was generous, direct, and exactly the lunch we wanted.
We had spent the morning collecting Mumbai through landmarks and timelines. Around this small table, the city became more immediate: plates shared between us, glasses lifted, servers moving quickly, and conversations filling every gap in the room.
After lunch · back to Apollo Bunder
We had seen the icon.
Now we wanted to enter its story.
After Leopold, we walked back toward the red dome. From the plaza, the Taj Mahal Palace had been part of Mumbai’s skyline. Inside, it became a sequence of rooms, objects, courtyards, and memories—less a single monument than a living archive.
The founding vision · 1898–1903
A gift to the city he believed Bombay could become.
Tata Central Archives describes Jamsetji N. Tata’s decision to build a modern hotel at Apollo Bunder as a gift to Bombay. Construction began in 1898. When the hotel opened on December 16, 1903, its first night welcomed just 17 guests.
The ambition was both civic and international: an Indian-owned hotel that could meet the world at the harbour. Its architecture brought together Rajput, Saracenic, and Victorian Gothic influences, while its interiors introduced comforts that were strikingly modern for their time.
Editorial archive · four turning points
A hotel becomes
part of a city’s memory.
The timeline begins with the founder, follows the palace as Mumbai’s waterfront changes around it, and pauses at the moment when architectural heritage became inseparable from collective loss and restoration.
November 2008 · restoration and return
To restore the Taj was to defend more than a building.
The Taj Mahal Palace was one of the places attacked during the coordinated terrorist attacks in Mumbai in November 2008. The loss belongs first to the victims, their families, the staff, and the city. Any architectural story must begin there.
The palace then underwent a comprehensive restoration. IHCL’s official milestone history records its reopening in 2010. Returning the hotel to use did not erase what happened; it allowed hospitality, work, and ordinary public life to continue in a place violence had tried to redefine.
The palace today · our walk inside
History remained everywhere—but the hotel did not feel frozen.
Light moved through the arches into the courtyard. Guests talked beside the pool. Staff crossed the lobby beneath chandeliers and flowers. The Taj carries its age through craftsmanship and ceremony, but what gives those rooms meaning is that they are still being used.
Next landmark · CSMT
A railway station built with the confidence of a palace.
Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus did not sit quietly at the end of the road. Its towers, carved stone, pointed arches, and clock seemed to gather the whole junction around them—even as taxis, buses, and motorcycles kept cutting through the foreground.
1853 · 1878–1888 · 2004
The railway came first. The monument grew around its ambition.
India’s first passenger train left Bori Bunder for Thane on 16 April 1853. A generation later, construction began on the grand terminus that would replace the earlier station. Designed by F. W. Stevens and built over ten years from 1878, it joined High Victorian Gothic Revival architecture with forms and craftsmanship drawn from Indian traditions.
UNESCO inscribed the terminus on the World Heritage List in 2004, recognising that fusion—and the extraordinary fact that this elaborate nineteenth-century building continues to serve railway life.
Editorial visual timeline
From terminus to civic stage.
The archive makes the junction legible: first the railway palace, then its municipal counterpart, then the two towers sharing the same urban frame.
The junction today
The archive was sepia. The present arrived in horns, headlights, and warm stone.
That contrast made CSMT memorable. The craftsmanship asks you to stop and look; the road insists that Mumbai will keep moving around you. Both impressions belong in the same frame.
Turn across the road · BMC headquarters
Then another landmark answered back.
Completed in 1893, the Municipal Corporation building was also designed by F. W. Stevens. Its central tower gives the crossroads a rare architectural tension: railway power on one side, civic government on the other, both expressed at monumental scale.
Seeing the two buildings together changed the stop. This was not one famous façade; it was a whole nineteenth-century civic room, still filled every day by twenty-first-century Mumbai.
Next stop · golden hour
Above Marine Drive, Mumbai traded its street-level rush for a long horizon.
Before dinner, we went to Dome—the open-air rooftop bar at the InterContinental Marine Drive. The plan was simple: one drink, a place facing the Arabian Sea, and enough time to watch the city change colour.
Back Bay · reclamation · Art Deco
This crescent was shaped by the city, not simply found by it.
Marine Drive emerged from the Back Bay reclamation works of the early twentieth century. The reclaimed waterfront gave Bombay room to expand westward and created a new sea-facing promenade framed by Art Deco residences, commercial buildings, and places of entertainment.
UNESCO now recognises that urban ensemble as part of Mumbai’s Victorian Gothic and Art Deco World Heritage property. Seen from Dome, the history becomes geography: the curve of the bay, the promenade beside it, and the modern city rising behind both.
Editorial visual timeline
Before the road. The new promenade. The necklace at night.
Three elevated views explain why this rooftop matters: the shoreline before Marine Drive, the transformed waterfront, and the illuminated arc that gave the bay its enduring nickname.
One drink became a sequence
First the sea. Then the skyline. Then the lights.
The view did not arrive all at once. Each photograph caught a different version of the same table: beer still cold, sky turning warmer, candles beginning to glow, and the far side of the bay slowly separating itself from the haze.
Blue hour → night
The crescent finally switched on.
When darkness settled, the traffic below stopped reading as congestion and became a stream of light. Marine Drive traced the bay in gold, and the nickname made immediate sense: the Queen’s Necklace was not a monument to visit, but a city-scale image that appeared only after sunset.
From the rooftop, Mumbai seemed briefly legible—the sea on one side, the dense city on the other, and that luminous curve holding them together.
Temporary-local note
For this view, timing is part of the reservation.
Dome is an open-air rooftop, so sunset, weather, seating, and dress requirements can shape the experience. The hotel currently lists the bar on rooftop Level 8 and describes age and dress restrictions; confirm the latest details directly before going.
Arrive before sunset if the full visual sequence matters. Daylight reveals the geometry of Back Bay; dusk softens the skyline; darkness turns Marine Drive into the Queen’s Necklace. Traffic can reshape the schedule, so leave more travel margin than the map suggests.
Next day · Holiday Inn Mumbai International Airport
The hotel stopped being somewhere to leave our bags. It became headquarters.
The next morning, we did not go sightseeing. We worked: meetings around the hotel, conversations over breakfast, and online Zoom calls from the room as we prepared a new product portfolio for the India market.
Room desk · hotel meetings · Zoom
Launching a portfolio is built from many small, unglamorous moments.
The India launch work did not happen as one ceremonial event. It happened through product samples arranged on a shelf, presentation slides open on a laptop, packaging unpacked from boxes, and conversations moving between people in the hotel and people joining online.
That is where the Holiday Inn proved its value. The room gave us a dependable desk and Wi-Fi; the public spaces gave us places to meet; the restaurant kept the day from breaking apart whenever one conversation ran into the next.
Saptami · the working-day restaurant
Between calls, the hotel fed the day.
Saptami’s tall glass walls and open dining room made it useful for more than meals. We could meet people without leaving the property, return to work quickly, and find enough variety for different appetites and schedules.
The hotel describes Saptami as its all-day, multi-cuisine restaurant. For us, that translated into something more practical: breakfast before the meetings began, lunch between conversations, and a reliable table whenever the workday needed a pause.
Included with our stay
Breakfast. Lunch. Cocktail hour. More than enough food.
The benefits attached to our stay included complimentary breakfast and lunch, followed later by cocktail hours with a generous amount of food. On a dense working day, that mattered. We did not have to search for every meal or lose time crossing the city between appointments.
By the final evening, cocktail hour was substantial enough for us. The hotel had quietly solved the practical side of the day: somewhere to work, somewhere to meet, and somewhere to eat without turning each need into another journey.
My last night in Mumbai
The city had been our destination. The hotel had become our launchpad.
That final night did not need another landmark. The meaningful work was already spread across the room: products introduced, conversations started, plans sharpened, and a new India chapter beginning before the Mumbai chapter had quite ended.
Departure day · Mumbai
Time to leave.
Not time to say goodbye.
This had been my first journey through India—an amazing introduction to a country that already felt larger than one visit could hold. Mumbai was the final city on this chapter, but not the final chapter itself. I will be back in India in September 2026.
Mumbai airport · lounge pause
A softer transition between India and the long flight ahead.
Lounge access in Mumbai gave us what a long travel day needed most: a quieter place to sit, enough food for an unhurried meal, and time to settle before boarding. It did not shorten the journey, but it made the journey feel more manageable.
ANA · Mumbai to Tokyo Haneda
Homeward, with Japan between chapters.
We flew with ANA through Tokyo Haneda. Once aboard, the wide seat, meal service, and quiet cabin created another kind of breathing room—the welcome feeling that the logistics were now carrying us, and we could simply follow the journey home.
HND · Japan in between
Another lounge. Another chance to arrive at the next flight rested.
During the Haneda connection, lounge access made the layover feel less like dead time and more like part of the journey. There was space to sit, something to eat, and enough calm to gather ourselves before the last sector home.
Mumbai and Haneda offered very different surroundings, but the value was the same: fewer hurried decisions, more room to breathe, and a noticeably more pleasurable long-haul trip.
The promise
This was not goodbye.
India, I’ll see you again in September 2026.
My first visit gave me landmarks, meals, work, friendships, and more questions than answers—in the best possible way. I left grateful for what we experienced and excited that the next India chapter already had a date.
Mumbai → Tokyo Haneda → home
First journey complete.
The next one is already calling.
We arrived in India as first-time visitors and left with experiences that had already begun to shape what comes next. The flight home closed the itinerary, but the promise to return kept the story open.