Manav Darji

Last year when they announced @EFDevcon would be in Mumbai, I already knew people were going to complain. Anyone landing in Mumbai and seeing the traffic, the crowds, the missing footpaths, the AQI is going to react. I’m Indian and I know Mumbai is not comparable to many top-tier cities. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Still, the broad takes bother me. India has the largest population in the world and the infrastructure never caught up. Cities like Mumbai keep pulling in people looking for work and better lives, so the same limited roads and systems get more pressure every year. That is most of what people are seeing. A few days in Mumbai also doesn’t show the rest of the country. The smaller towns, the hills, the villages, the different ways people live and work. That part gets left out of the generalisation. What a short trip also misses is the underlying drive. Across almost every field, Indians show up disproportionately, both inside the country and outside it. The average person here is constantly trying to move up a level - better work, better education, better life for their kids. It doesn’t pause, and it rarely feels satisfied. That hunger and drive sits underneath a lot of the chaos. People are still pushing hard with whatever infrastructure and opportunity they have. I’m glad Devcon happened here. It gave Indian builders direct access to people they usually only interact with online. But if the only thing that sticks with you is the disorder of the city, you’re missing the more interesting part: a society that keeps trying to outrun its constraints.