The logic is straightforward. If even a blind person could find his or her way around Mumbai, the city would be easy as pie for everyone else. So, what is it like to be blind in Mumbai? In February 1991, I 'blinded' myself for a week (Mumbai through a blind man's eyes, Nov 6) and experienced for myself the nightmare of Mumbai's open spaces, where nothing is as it should be. Where every step could be your last. Where whole human beings disappear into manholes during the rains, where it is normal for newly-built flyovers to collapse.

I wrote about my experiences in the Indian Express, little realising how much outrage I would set off among the blind by presuming that my weeklong experiment could approximate their lifetime of blindness. "The world is not made for blind people," I was told by an official of the National Association of the Blind. "It's made by the sighted for the sighted. We must fit ourselves into the framework." That 'framework' has looked battle-ravaged and devastated for over four decades now. Mumbai's public spaces are ruins, forever being taken apart and put together again in a loop that never ends. The textures, colours and sounds of the civic environment are selected arbitrarily rather than with science and expertise.