CITY FOCUS | MUMBAI
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I ndia ’ s second city of Mumbai lies on the country ’ s western coast , where it faces the Arabian sea . Its prime location has seen it contested by a succession of empires , both native and foreign , during the course of its long history . Today , the city is India ’ s wealthiest , serving as the unofficial commercial capital as opposed to the national capital of Delhi . According to the UN , the city ’ s population in 2018 was 19.98mn , second in India behind Delhi at 28.51mn .
One cannot talk of Mumbai without mentioning Bollywood , the Hindi-language film industry based in the city . With its name derived from a portmanteau of “ Hollywood ” and “ Bombay ”, “ Bollywood ” is sometimes also used to metonymically refer to Indian cinema as a whole . India is the world ’ s largest film market by a number of metrics , including films produced per year ( 1,813 in 2018 ) and tickets sold ( over 2.2bn in 2016 ).
The narrower definition of the term is the jewel in the crown of the Indian film industry . According to the Film Federation of India , Bollywood outputted 306 films in 2017 , while , with the help of films in other languages , Mumbai as a whole produced 694 . A number of the Indian film industry ’ s heavy hitters are
JANUARY 2020