New Delhi, Oct. 30 -- The tumult of a world growing ever more closed and insecure has found its mirror, especially in India's metros, in the slow degeneration of social structures and, worse, in the loss of community and childhood experiences.

Mumbai once nurtured remarkable micro-communities: the chawl with its shared taps and gossip, the middle-class colony where Diwali meant collective rangoli patterns, and the narrow lanes where children played under the benign eyes of neighbours who might scold yet feed them. These spaces blurred class lines and built the city's greatest scaffold of invisible infrastructure: trust.

A recent Netflix documentary, The Perfect Neighbor, created almost entirely from police bodycam footage, reveals the p...