In the chaotic and blinding dazzle of Diwali celebrations in Mumbai, I searched for numbers that would help put a definiteness to it all. How large is the festival economy considering that Diwali is the motherlode of all festival spending? What is the gap between the topmost spenders and those at the bottom of the wealth pyramid? How has this inequality gap behaved in the past decade or in the past five years since the pandemic? And what can all this tell us about Mumbai’s society as it is today?

Searching for answers to such questions is like trying to find a quiet and no-smoke spot in the city that routinely goes berserk with firecrackers, shrugging off their impact on the worsening air quality and offering nonsensical explanations to justify the continued use of the stuff. Such a spot

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