Phantom India

Bombay. It's the last lap of Louis Malle 's journey through India and already it smacks of the West. Bombay is a city on the move, in the middle of an economic boom. Parsee industrialists, Muslim craftsmen, and immigrant labourers from the South all meet here in this cosmopolitan city, whose slums are as poverty-stricken as those of Calcutta, but whose modern factories, oil refineries, and traffic problems all show the shadow of the West. It's where Hinduism meets Industrialisation, where East goes West, where the India of yesterday and today meets the India of tomorrow. But what kind of tomorrow?