A Mumbai man sold snacks while cows and cabbies looked on. (Mariana Martinez Estens)

They’re mending the sidewalk down the street from Chhatrapati Sivaji (formerly Victoria Terminus) train station. Mumbai’s ubiquitous Premier Padmini taxis swerve to avoid a seven-foot pile of gravel. But instead of the Caterpillar backhoes and lounging men that make up U.S. road crews, this gravel is being tended by a team of women clad in brightly-colored saris. They heft shallow iron bowls of gravel onto their heads and carry them over to a large hole in the ground. Slowly the sidewalks of one of the world’s largest cities get fixed.

In a market a few blocks away, teams of two guide rickety wooden carts between lines of stopped traffic. The carts are loaded down with piles of eggplants, bundles of grass wrapped in burlap and bolts of fabric. It’s a scene that could be happening along a rutted lane in a village in Uttar Pradesh, the heart of India’s cow belt. Then another cart makes its way through the crowd. Twenty boxes marked “InkJet Cartridges” are lined neatly on it.

Talking to the class before they left for India, journalist Suketu Mehta described Mumbai as a city of contrasts: contrasts between urban and rural and between rich and poor. In his book “Maximum City,” Mehta writes about driving through Mumbai with his son: “‘Look,’ Gautama points out as we are driving along the road from Bandra Reclamation. ‘On the one side villages, on the other side buildings.’ He has identified the slums for what they are: villages in the city. The visual shock of Bombay is the shock of this juxtaposition.” On their last day in India, the group of 16 journalists are left to their own devices to explore the jarring juxtapositions that make up Mumbai.

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The day dawned drowsy for many members of the group after a late night at the Red Light dance club in Mumbai’s Colaba neighborhood. The night had been highlighted by some interesting cross-cultural encounters. At one point, Jesse Ellison ran up and announced “The Sikhs have Aruna!” and led several people to where Aruna Viswanatha, an Indian-American student from New Jersey, was being playfully tossed in the air by a smiling Sikh. And when Daddy Yankee’s reggaeton hit “Gasolina” came on, Sree Sreenivasan told a student that his twins, named after Hindu gods Durga and Krishna, thought the lyrics were “Hanuman Gasolina” (literally: “Monkey god gasoline”) instead of “Dame Mas Gasolina” (“Give me more gasoline.”)

Some students used Monday to continue reporting. Shira Schoenberg spoke to teachers at ORT India, part of an international non-profit vocational training group, and the Jewish Community Center about efforts to educate Mumbai’s dwindling Jewish population. Michal Lumsden talked to T.R.K. Somaiya at Bombay Sarvodaya Mandal about Muslim-Hindu relations in India and the Gandhian peace movement. Erik Wander interviewed amateur cricketers at a public park near Wankhede Stadium where England’s cricket team was busy trouncing India’s. Asked later if he thought things would get out of control following England’s victory, Wander said: “Cricket doesn’t really lend itself to hooliganism. They break for tea in the middle for God’s sake!”

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Since the earliest days of the British East India Company, Mumbai has always been a city of mercantilism. As Mehta writes: “Bombay is all about transaction – dhanda. It was founded as a trading city, built at the entrance to the rest of the world, and everybody was welcome as long as they wanted to trade.” To honor this tradition, many in the group set out on last minute shopping excursions. Some picked up scarves at the elegant Oberoi hotel, others shopped for bhangra music, Bollywood soundtracks and Sufi chants at Rhythm House in Colaba.

In the afternoon, six students, Sreenivasan and Delhi-based journalist Mannika Chopra left the heat and frenzy of the Mumbai streets to visit Dina Vakil, the former editor of the Times of India’s Mumbai edition and a 1970 graduate of the Columbia Journalism school (Vakil did her Master’s Project on John Updike, who at one point sent her a note saying: “I’ve spent more time with you than I have on some of my short stories.”)

As endless trays of tea, coffee and biscuits were brought into her third-floor office, Vakil sat among dozens of statues of Ganesh and tall, neat piles of The Economist and Time and talked about the last three decades of Indian journalism. In the early 1980s, Vakil worked alongside pioneering journalist Arun Shourie, then editor of the Indian Express, on investigative stories that railed against government corruption. Vakil went on to work at the Indian Post and The Independent before joining the Times of India.

She talked about how the watershed of investigative journalism in the 1980s gave way to market forces after India’s economic liberalization in the 1990s. She said that editorial decisions today are a balancing act. “You have to create an editorial environment that pulls in advertisements, and that’s the challenge for editors,” Vakil said. “It’s a balance between what the market wants and what you think the market should get.”

That evening the group gathered for a final meal before getting on an early morning flight back to New York. Glasses of Scotch were raised in toasts to Sreenivasan and Chopra. As an orange crescent moon rose over Mumbai and the thermometer slowly dropped, people started thinking about the city they were returning to. Ari Paul compared Mumbai and New York by saying: “I think of it this way: take New York, double it and replace every hardcore Jew with a hardcore Muslim.” Shira Schoenberg said that Mumbai was “almost like another New York, just with crazier drivers, more obvious poverty, and more aggressive salesmen.” Aruna Viswanatha mused that: “People say that Delhi is like D.C. and Bombay is India’s New York, but I think they get it wrong. Bombay is New York and L.A. combined with a dash of rural Mississippi.”