Mid-day has an interesting section called Mumbai Dope with trivia about the city.
- Mumbai’s suburban rail systems carry a total of 2.2 billion passengers every year. Incidentally, the world’s population is 6 billion. [Yazad: 2.2 billion passenger-journeys is what they mean]
- As of June 2003, there are an incredible 982 villages in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region.
- The name Bombay was derived from Bom Bahia (The Good Bay), a name given by Portuguese sailor Francis Almeida, in 1508.
They have 12 pages of such trivia, and searchable too. Now if only they could give their sources and give this a consistent look and language, it would be a great column!
Hey! Very interesting pieces of trivia… most of which I didn’t know.
I specially liked the ‘troops leaving through the GAteway of India” bit…