Tremble with fear, Mr Bush, Mumbai is angry

And reiterated by speaker after speaker, including freedom fighter Lakshmi Sehgal, writer Arundhati Roy, British MP Jeremy Corbyn and Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi.

Amir al Rekaby, a leading voice of democracy from Iraq, urged people around the world to look at Mesopotamia, ‘‘where history is being re-written’’. ‘‘Occupation (by the US forces) is destroying (my people),’’ he said in Arabic.

Jeremy Corbyn, in a speech full of fire and brimstone, called Iraq a country up for sale.

Arundhati Roy, in a hot pink dupatta offset on white, provided the drama for the evening: ‘‘Debating imperialism is like debating the pros and cons of rape.’’ She urged the people gathered to pick two American companies which benefited from Iraq contracts, get their addresses around the world, boycott them and shut them down.

Now one understands why Mosanto sent a spiffy three-member PR team around to newspaper offices a week ago. ‘‘Call us, if you want clarifications,’’ they said. Food security is one of the issues expected to draw the biggest crowds.

Lakshmi Sehgal, who impressively boomed at 90, with a fist and arm raised, said the plight of women must change. ‘‘They are the last to be hired, first to be fired.’’ Asma Jehangir, the Pakistani human rights activist, sat on one of the chairs near the stage, praising the way the Indians had given visas to her countrymen. Shabana Azmi, one of the opening speakers, had the organisers in a hop trying to arrange a front-row seat for her mother.

Leaning on a tamarind tree at Nesco grounds in Goregaon, you could instantly plug into the live-wire energy from the sea of humanity milling around you. Thousands upon thousands of excited protestors streamed into the grounds all day.

They were as diverse as a Dalit from Madhya Pradesh, a Chinese band that didn’t want the Olympics home in 2008, a labour rights lawyer from the Netherlands, a sexual rights activist from Thailand.

Their banners were getting tangled with each other, the train of Bhutanese dancers getting mixed with the kathakali troupe and the Europeans, frazzled with the heat, couldn’t help but smile wanly.

At the main stage Pakistani sufi band Junoon made the audience yell over and over again: ‘‘Chain ek pal nahin (Not a moment of peace)!’’. A six-and-a-half-foot German freelancer, who didn’t understand a word of the song, was the loudest.

When the song finished, he scratched his head thinking which one of the 200 meetings he should go to—which is the World Social Forum agenda for tomorrow.