Professor Arjun Appadurai is a Mumbaikar at heart; coming to the city is an annual pilgrimage for this internationally renowned cultural theorist and anthropologist. Appadurai, 62, who studied in Mumbai’s Elphinstone College, is currently Goddard Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. He has been consultant and advisor to a wide range of public and private foundations such as The Smithsonian. In his seminal work Disjuncture and Difference in Global Cultural Economy, Appadurai argues that the world has become a single system with a range of complex subsystems. Appadurai proposed five main ‘scapes’ of global culture: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes and ideoscapes. During his six-week, seven-city trip this year, he looked closely at how the corruption slur has overtaken the India story and also, partly in relation to this, how the mediascape has exploded. Excerpts from an interview with Smruti Koppikar, an edited version of which appeared in print: