Wanted. BCom, preferably MBA, with clean habits and good communication skills essential - maybe with experience as a software engineer. Not an advert for a top job, but a personal ad, which, coupled with a horoscope (which should be compatible with any potential partner) places very specific demands on would-be husbands or brides. It is a perfect example of India's unusual coexistence of high aspiration and a belief in fate and destiny. The journey to the air...

The first rain since arrival arrives in the early hours of the morning. It does not last for long, but for long enough to attract enough mosquitoes to leave me a little more lumpy than when I went to sleep. I read in the morning paper that the cases of malaria and dengue fever in Mumbai are on the increase - it acts as my reminder to take one more of the 160-plus malaria tablets that I have been prescribed. Outside, a crow is snacking on a roti (chapatti). Crows...

A maze of hundreds of rusting metal pipes interconnect dozens of gigantic metal vats. The structure is held together by a thin skeleton of metal girders. Everything - from the coffee cups to the toilets - has a purple hue. Purple men carry purple sludge from one storage tank to another, amid a persistent hum. The thick smell of ammonia coupled with the heat makes it heavy breathing. I have not been smoking something. This is a chemical factory, outside Mumbai, ...

Tuk-tuks zig-zag across our path. At the side of the road a man is slicing sugar cane and feeding it into a mechanical crusher - releasing its juice - which he offers for sale. A garishly decorated lorry (most lorries in India are uniquely decorated by their drivers) overtakes with the ubiquitous "Horn OK Please" daubed on the back. Fellow road users need no second invitation; the hooting from one direction or another is incessant. The highways provide...

The plane windows steam up almost instantly as it sinks beneath the clouds. A woman behind me, equally unfamiliar with monsoon season Mumbai questions whether it is humidity or rain. I wonder the same. From the air Mumbai is remarkably dark for a city of 13 million people, a few fluorescent lamps and the distinctive single lamps of the tuk-tuks cut through the gloom. I image London in the blackout era would have appear similar. It isn't raining, just very humid....