Also rechristened in Mumbai’s nationalist-inspired anti-Raj drive, but more often than not referred to as “VT,” this baroque, cathedral-like building must rank as Mumbai’s most marvelous Raj-era monument. India’s very first steam engine left this station when it was completed in 1887; today at least a thousand trains leave every day, carrying some 2.5 million commuters in and out of the city.
With its vaulted roofs, arches, Gothic spires, flying buttresses, gables crowned by neoclassical sculptures, stone carvings, and exquisite friezes, the terminus is an architectural gem, worth entering to see the massive ribbed Central Dome (topped by a statue of the torch-wielding “Progress”) that caps an octagonal tower featuring beautiful stained-glass windows with colorful images of trains and floral patterns. But come, too, for the spectacle of the disparate people, from sari-clad beauties to half-naked fakirs, that makes up Mumbai.
Get here just before lunch to watch the famous dabba-wallas stream out into the city: A vast network of dabba-wallas transfer some 200,000 cooked lunches, prepared by housewives for their office-bound husbands, and kept warm in identical dabbas (metal tiffin containers), through a unique sorting and multiple-relay distribution system; later in the afternoon these empty dabbas are returned to their home of origin. The success of this system (no one gets the wrong lunch) is proof of how well India works, despite its reputation for obstructive bureaucracy. In fact, following a study of this network, U.S. business magazine Forbes gave it a Six Sigma (99.99% accuracy) performance rating, which means that just one error occurs in six million transactions.