The Kala Ghoda Arts Festival 2026, to be held from 31 January to 8 February, returns with over 400 programmes across 15 verticals, celebrating arts, culture, and community under the theme “Ahead of the Curve.” As Asia’s largest multidisciplinary street arts festival, KGAF continues to champion accessibility, innovation, and inclusive cultural dialogue, with all events free and open to the public.
As part of this vibrant cultural platform, Avid Learning will present Writing the Metropolis: The Many Lives of Mumbai, a panel discussion that explores how the city has been imagined, recorded, and reinterpreted through literature.
Mumbai has always been more than a city—it is a living text. Restless, inventive, contradictory, and deeply layered, its stories unfold through voices shaped by memory, migration, ambition, and belonging.
In this engaging conversation, Anindita Ghose, Sidharth Bhatia, Shormistha Mukherjee and Asad Laljee come together to discuss how writing captures Mumbai’s humour, hustle, generosity, and grit, while tracing the personal and collective journeys that unfold across its streets and shorelines.
Anindita Ghose is a writer, journalist, and communications consultant based in Bombay, where she arrived as a newborn and still lives. She is the author of the novel The Illuminated. Anindita was previously the editor of the Saturday magazine Mint Lounge and the features director of Vogue India, and led strategic communications for a global social impact consultancy. She studied journalism and linguistics at Columbia University and the University of Mumbai. Anindita has conceived, commissioned, and edited The Only City, which also features a short story by her.
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A Bandra chronicler and urbanist, Shormistha Mukherjee, documents the neighbourhood’s visual and cultural landscape through @housesofbandra, her Substack Memory Keepers of Bandra, and thoughtful oral histories of its older residents. Inspired by Orhan Pamuk’s idea of modest neighbourhood museums, she uses words, videos, and installations to honour Bandra’s people, stories, and shifting shoreline. A longtime creative with over 30 years in advertising and co-founder of Flying Cursor, she’s also the author of Cancer, You Picked the Wrong Girl. Shormistha loves local history, human stories, old newspapers, and wandering every hidden by-lane she can find - keeping Bandra’s memory alive with curiosity and heart.
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Asad Lalljee is the Senior Vice President of Essar Group, CEO of Avid Learning, a public programming initiative and creative platform under the Essar Group, and Curator of the Royal Opera House, Mumbai. Before relocating to India, he spent 14 years as one of the ‘Mad Men’ advertising executives on New York's Madison Avenue. Asad has transformed Avid Learning into India’s leading cultural hub through international collaborations and partnerships with the country’s biggest art platforms. Since the restoration of the Royal Opera House, his curatorial programming has re-established its reputation as the city’s cultural crown jewel. He also serves on the Executive Committee of the Kala Ghoda Association and the advisory board of the Mumbai Urban Art Festival (2022-23). Amid the pandemic (April 2020), Asad pivoted from Avid Learning to Avid Online, presenting 240 programs in a year. An early adopter of technology trends, he specializes in new media, curating programs around AI and the cyberfuture. Asad holds a B.A. in Economics from St. Xavier's College and an M.A. in Global Marketing Communications from Emerson College, Boston.
Read moreWhat does it mean to write about a city that never stays still? A city that resists neat definitions, that rewrites itself daily through migration, memory, ambition, and loss? Mumbai has long demanded to be written not as a fixed place, but as a living, breathing text—layered, contradictory, and constantly in motion.
For decades, writers have returned to Mumbai to make sense of its scale and intimacy. From Rohinton Mistry’s quiet portraits of everyday endurance, from Suketu Mehta’s immersive nonfiction to works of Jerry Pinto and Shanta Gokhale, the city has been documented as both promise and pressure. Each writer captures a different version of Mumbai, yet together they reveal a city shaped as much by personal experience as by history.
Writing the Metropolis: The Many Lives of Mumbai enters this ongoing conversation by asking how writing continues to shape the way the city is seen, remembered, and imagined. The session brings together Anindita Ghose, Sidharth Bhatia, Shormistha Mukherjee, and Asad Lalljee, whose work spans journalism, cultural criticism, and long-form storytelling. Rather than offering definitive answers, the discussion traces how writers observe, interpret, and live within the city they write about.
Writing about Mumbai often means negotiating closeness. Many writers are not distant observers, but participants—moving through the same streets, negotiating the same pressures, and absorbing the same contradictions they later put into words. The city’s humour, resilience, generosity, and grit emerge not as abstract ideas, but as lived realities. In capturing these moments, writing becomes a way to pause the city’s relentless pace, even if only briefly.
There is also the question of scale. Mumbai is experienced differently depending on where one stands within it. Stories shift across neighbourhoods, languages, and social boundaries, and no single narrative can contain them all. The session reflects on how writers choose perspective, voice, and form, and how those choices determine which parts of the city come into focus and which remain at the margins.
Set within the broader context of the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival 2026, the conversation gains an added dimension. Kala Ghoda’s public, open setting places literary reflection within the everyday life of the city itself. The festival’s theme, “Ahead of the Curve,” echoes the session’s concern with how writing keeps pace with a city that is always changing, always anticipating what comes next.
What lingers after such a conversation is not a single image of Mumbai, but an awareness of its multiplicity. Writing does not simplify the city; it makes its complexity visible. By bringing together writers who have spent years paying attention to Mumbai’s rhythms and contradictions, Writing the Metropolis: The Many Lives of Mumbai reminds us that to write the city is to accept that it will always remain unfinished—constantly rewritten by those who call it home.
