A comment I wrote on a post where someone wondered if the sea was what made Bombay special:
It’s the sea. It’s the sea off the slightly rustic beaches at Aksa and Manori and Uttan, and Madh; the sea that stubbornly insists at northern Versova beach that it will not take shit, then switches mood, laps at the fringes of a competing sea of humanity at Juhu, then alternately cools and steams Khar along Carter Road, plays background to a thousand selfies an evening at Bandstand, skulks anonymously under the Sea Link, letting the structure take all the attention. As suburbia turns to City, it’s the sea that runs placidly, featurelessly along Worli Seaface so as to not distract from an art gallery’s worth of sunsets, plays hide and seek with Haji Ali’s approach road, then quite literally defines the graceful queen’s necklace, lets Bombay run a few kilometres to the south before sweeping it back up north and east, creating Apollo Bunder and Gateway and the Tajs and disappearing behind military walls, docks hosting cargo both mundane and not, north north north before finally welcoming the Ulhas river at its flamingo-festooned creek, saying to its waters No matter what you’ve seen inland it’s nothing compared to what you’re going to sweep against every day now.