It comes straight at you - abrasive, in-your-face and extremely chaotic.

Called variously the city of dreams, the Manhattan of India, the financial capital of the country and even the slum city overrun with open drains, sprawling, dirty ugly slums and millions of human beings who live their lives with clockwork precision, Mumbai is no destination for the faint-hearted traveller.

The first thing that hits you about Mumbai - called Bombay till 1994, when the Shiv Sena party, then in power in Maharashtra, decided to go back to the roots and renamed the city - are the teeming crowds. They are everywhere. Spilling out of the local trains, the red BEST buses that connect the city from every corner, pouring out of the concrete, faceless office blocks and apartments that dot the city's skyline, walking the streets, jostling, nudging, hurrying and reaching almost nowhere.

Mumbai shocks you at every corner. It's a city neatly divided on the two sides of the railway line that runs through its length and breadth. On the eastern and the central end are the industries and the sprawling slums. Here, Mumbai is brutal, dusty and dirty. Tiny pigeonholes pass off as homes and the people living in them almost pour out onto the railway line. Madanpura, Byculla, Saat Rasta, Dagdi chawl are mean streets of Mumbai, once ruled by the dreaded underworld dons Dawood Ibrahim, Arun Gawli and Chotta Rajan.

Not that the western part of Mumbai does not have its zhopadpattis  (as the slums are called in local parlance). There is Dharavi, Asia's biggest slums. And also, its biggest leather accessories manufacturing zone. Located within its huts are small leather processing units and dye industries. It's difficult to believe that snazzy leather bags and belts are made in an area that seems a prototype of hell with its open sewers and narrow drains.

But on the whole, the western part of the city is where some of the snazziest restaurants, pubs, discos and the beaches are located. Then there are the central areas, the Maharashtrian-dominated Dadar and the Tamil-dominated Matunga, which resembles some part of Tamil Nadu with its several temples and mogra-selling vendors.

But the most interesting part of the city is what Mumbaikars refer to as 'town'. The Charni road-Chowpatty-Marine Drive-Gateway of India stretch that has rows of Art Deco Buildings and old Gothic structures.

From powerful mafia dons to their pathetic side kicks, from the noisy Ganapati festival to the equally noisy Mount Mary fair, from the infamous cages of the red-light district in which live thousands of prostitutes to slums, several contradictions exist cheek-by-jowl.

Most travellers use Mumbai only as a transit point, scared off by its reputation as a big, mean, squalid city. If you try and get over the cliches, there is a lot it offers to explorers.