We’ve heard Mumbai began on seven islands, before the sea in between them was filled in, and the city spread on top of it. Not many of us know just how much of the Western half of Mumbai is built on reclamations—from Colaba right up to Andheri and Mira Bhayandar. But every year, the monsoon reminds us that a lot of what seems like Mumbai's solid ground was once water—a place where rainstorms met rivers meeting the sea.

In this episode, Raghu is joined by writer Amitav Ghosh, whose books are known for being filled with historical perspective, discovery and insight. The duo discusses the history of cyclones in the city, the toll climate change will take (on the middle-class especially), and what happens when The Big One comes.

It’s been known for almost a century that life in a big, densely-populated city comes with higher risks of anxiety, depression, or even more serious psychological afflictions. Still our cities are growing – our world is becoming more and more an urban one. Only very few of us can afford to move away to greener pastures in Goa or Uttarakhand. For everyone else, it’s an urgent question – can cities like Mumbai grow, and stop damaging us? How can we put the ‘mental’ back into environmental health?

In this episode, Ruchita Chandrashekar helps Raghu answer these questions. She’s a psychologist from Mumbai, with a special interest in trauma, violence and the ways we view – or hide psychological health in Indian society.

One of the easiest things to like about Mumbai is the way women are able to live here. Mumbai means a kind of liberation. It means feeling safe in public, feeling able to dress how you like – feeling welcome to go out, even after dark. But this isn’t just a natural quality the city was born with. It’s a legacy of working women – especially working-class women, most from oppressed castes or religious minorities.

In this episode, Raghu is joined by Ramya Ramanath to understand this story better — a development and policy scholar, teaching at DePaul University in Chicago. She’s also the author of A Place to Call Home: Women as Agents of Change in Mumbai for which she did an ethnography – she talked to women of all kinds about staying on their feet as they’re displaced from their homes in a slum and resettled in flats in a high-rise. For planners and policy-makers, but also for the rest of us, there’s a lot to be surprised by.