SONYA FATAH

November 28, 2008
SONYA FATAH
THE TORONTO STAR

MUMBAI–Mumbai is usually India’s busiest city, legendary for its bustling commercial culture and its frustrating traffic jams.

But today, more than 24 hours after the co-ordinated attacks on the city’s elite southern suburbs, Mumbai was still paralyzed.

Air traffic to the city was significantly down, with early-morning flights from New Delhi carrying less than one-third their capacity.

The domestic airport, normally jam-packed with business people and tourists, was like a ghost town, quiet and subdued, matching the mood of the city.

“Things are better today than they were yesterday,” said Vinod Sharma, 42, a taxi driver who has been driving in the city for the last year.

“Yesterday no one was stepping out of their homes. Today at least there are cars on the street.”

Sharma was working Wednesday night when he witnessed one of the first attacks – a bomb explosion inside a fellow cab driver’s vehicle.

“I was standing barely 200 metres away,” he said. “The light had just turned green and the taxi shot ahead carrying this passenger.

“Who knows if he was the terrorist or not but all of a sudden there was a massive explosion and there was absolute carnage.

“I’m still shaking at the memory.”

Sharma said the roof of the taxi was blown so far away it couldn’t be found.

“There were limbs and blood and body parts everywhere. And one poor guy on a motorbike right there lost his life, too.”

Although the streets of Mumbai were quieter than usual, there were signs of a return to life in this city of 14 million. While some stores and offices remained closed in the area close to the Oberoi Hotel, one of the terrorists’ targets, a few public buses made their rounds past the area cordoned off by police.

Journalists and onlookers crowded around the barricades around the hotel.

There were reports that up to 30 hostages had been rescued today and were being taken away in a bus to safety but it was difficult to ascertain from the distance because riot police trucks had blocked off the street. Behind the hotel, a white tourist bus was parked outside and a steady stream of hostages emerging from the hotel began boarding it. Most appeared to be foreigners.

Beyond the public barricade, a bevy of fire trucks were parked still, and there was no sound of activity.

Earlier, police had told guests in the hotel to stay in their rooms.

“The situation is almost over but they are firing shots inside so we have to wait it out,” said police officer Tanaji Ghardze.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Leopold Cafe renowned as a Mumbai institution and as a favourite haunt for hungry backpackers

November 27, 2008
SONYA FATAH, THE TORONTO STAR

NEW DELHI–Nabbing a table at Leopold Cafe in Colaba, a south Mumbai neighbourhood that rubs shoulders with the Arabian Sea on one side, likely involves a wait.

The cafe, which opens up onto a bustling shopping street, has a string of tables that are practically on the pavement. The street is filled with makeshift stalls that are set up every morning to lure travellers.

Leopold Cafe is a favourite among the constant stream of backpackers to Colaba but it’s also a south Mumbai institution.

The cafe was always popular but became an international destination after the escaped Australian convict-turned writer Gregory David Roberts made numerous references to it in his 2004 bestseller, Shantaram.

In addition to its long-time local reputation, it’s high on the Lonely Planet checklist of places-to-eat-in.

Colaba is also a stone’s throw from the Gateway to India, a colonial arched structure that forms the city’s southern-most point of entry from the jetties that take people to villages and sights across the water.

The Taj Hotel, one of the city’s oldest hotels that dates back a century, is just across from the Gateway and overlooks a long glimmering stretch of the Arabian Sea.

Its Victorian architecture makes it a landmark building for just about everyone: taxi drivers, visitors from the suburbs, people from the elite cocoon of South Mumbai and, of course, a place to stay for those who can afford its pricey rate, often north of $400 a night.

It was built in 1903 by Jamsetji N. Tata, the Indian industrialist, who believed that Bombay (as Mumbai used to be known) needed a grand hotel to take its place among the great cities of the world.

The Taj was built by the Tata family, and is one of India’s most popular luxury chain hotels, with some properties overseas as well.

South Mumbai is really an enclave of the city’s rich and famous. The streets are broad, flanked in many places by large green parks, fountains, and a mix of turn of the century art deco buildings and earlier Victoria-era structures that remind the city and India of its British colonial heritage.

Victoria Terminus – named after Britain’s long-reigning queen – and now more proudly known as the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, after a local historical warrior figure, is one of Mumbai’s tributes to Victorian Gothic architecture that can be seen in several South Asian cities.

As the headquarters of the city’s busy central railway line that brings commuters from the suburbs and into the old city, it’s one of the busiest areas of India’s railway stations, not simply a place for commuters but also a must-see destination for anyone visiting the city.

Popularity: 5% [?]

November 26, 2008
SONYA FATAH
THE TORONTO STAR

NEW DELHI–For months, Ajit Singh had been chasing off calls from collection agencies. The calls then turned into home visits with threatening overtones. Finally, a collector came to his home, hurled a volley of abuse at him and threatened to beat him up.

Singh, 31, called the city’s police hotline, and was rescued just in time. But others, who have amassed vast debts in a scramble to be part of India’s new consumer culture, haven’t been so lucky.

India today boasts roughly 10 million credit-card customers. But consumer credit is relatively new here. Transactions have historically been cash-based.

Without a federal credit-checking system, and no legal apparatus to make cardholders responsible for their payments, companies have resorted to outsourcing recovery companies, which send out thugs and goons to intimidate clients, and in some cases beat them up.

Over the last few years, banks have targeted India’s rising middle class, an estimated 300 million strong population that forms India’s mass consumer market. They’re the target market for advertisers using massive billboard ads, full-page newspaper advertisements and television promos featuring Bollywood actors.

“There has been a geometric growth in credit card holders among the Indian middle classes in the last 10 years,” said S.R. Khanna, of Consumer Voice, a volunteer organization that seeks to improve consumer awareness. “Borrowing for consumption was not a part of the social practice in traditional India.”

But now the rush to purchase glitzy new products – from washing machines and fridges to the latest in cellular technology – has been intense over the last few years. Those purchases have been possible thanks to a liberal handout of credit cards, leading to massive amounts of individual debt that is now beginning to cripple those who splurged in their desire for an elevated, more fanciful lifestyle.

That’s exactly what Singh did.

After he got a job as a sales manager last year with Bajaj-Allianz, a major insurance company and began earning a monthly salary of 19,000 rupees (roughly $460), Singh found his desk flooded with offers from credit card companies. He accepted them all, and before he realized it, he’d amassed about $2,950 in debt.

Consumer aid organizations claim banks tack on additional charges and fees, aside from the interest rate, forcing customers to pay much more than they legally owe.

“One lady came to me in complete distress,” said C.V. Giddappa, general secretary of the Credit Card Holders Association, a voluntary organization formed in 2001 to protect the interests of cardholders.

“She had bought a television for 10,000 rupees (approximately $246) on her Standard Chartered credit card, and she was making monthly payments of $24. She made 17 payments, and after she had paid almost double the cost of the original item, her balance had reached a ridiculous ($566).

Giddappa’s organization recently filed a suit for a refund of some $1.2 billion. “We have investigated the balance sheets of these credit card companies and its clear to us that they are looting customers,” said Giddappa.

Others believe the onus also lies with the Indian consumer to take responsibility for poor borrowing practices.

“There are two sides to every coin, and the situation is complicated because Indian consumers don’t want to pay their monthly balances either,” said S.K. Virmani with the National Consumer Hotline. “They know they can just get another credit card and keep purchasing so they try to trick the system.”

Whatever the case, there’s no doubt that banks have resorted to all sorts of means to recover bad debt. In the western Indian city of Ludhiana, last month, Vivek Uppal, a businessman who had reached a settlement to end his financial woes, was picked up by two strongmen and a police officer, taken to a warehouse and beaten up.

“They abused and tortured me to pay 250,000 rupees as a recovery of the credit card,” Uppal wrote.

In the end, Uppal had to hand over an extra $2,000, despite official letters from the bank that stated otherwise.

Uppal’s case is not unique.

In mid-October this year, a family of four in Mumbai who were renting an apartment in a plush suburb of the city, committed suicide after debt accumulating on their 72 credit cards became enormous.

It’s likely that things won’t look up unless clients are better informed, and unless a federal system of credit checks is enforced.

“(The middle class) have been systematically trapped into debt,” said Giddappa. “The bank issues them one credit card, and … before they know it they have 10 to 12 credit cards, and they’re wrapped in a vicious cycle of debt.”

Popularity: 5% [?]

As urban India booms, thousands of workers insist on having meals ferried in from home

November 18, 2008
SONYA FATAH, THE TORONTO STAR

MUMBAI, India–Rajesh Vora sat at a table inside his office’s air-conditioned cafeteria, carefully opened the three-tier steel lunch box, and released the various, familiar aromas of his kitchen.

Around him, most folks availed of cafeteria food, piling their trays with Indian cuisine prepared at the office’s kitchen. But Vora and at least 15 others at ICICI Securities, one of the nation’s largest bank affiliates, prefer to get their food delivered to them from home just as they break for lunch.

For Vora, 38, who is vice president of equity research, the posh and unusually well-equipped cafeteria just isn’t a substitute for his wife’s cooking. For the last 10 years, he’s been subscribing to a uniquely Mumbai phenomenon: the dabbawalla or lunch-box man, paying a monthly rate of less than $10 to get his lunch picked up from home and delivered to his workplace.

“It’s a full-course meal,” said Vora, as he began digging into his curry, lentils, rice, Indian-style bread and fruit. “If I had eaten at home, I would have gotten absolutely the same meal.”

Over the past decade, urban India has undergone fast-paced change with tradition being quickly swapped for a slice of modernity. But in the country’s largest city – formerly known as Bombay and home to 25 million people – a 128-year-old business of ferrying lunch boxes across the city still thrives.

Some 200,000 dabbas are collected, delivered and returned six days a week by 5,000 dabbawallas who skirt their way through the city’s bustling streets, wearing their trademark white caps and balancing a multitude of boxes filled with home cooking on the handlebars of their bikes or on iron crates stacked on wooden carts that are wheeled around for delivery. Each is an independent businessman, leasing his services to Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Supplier Trust for between $100 and $250 a month.

The labour-intensive dabbawalla business became such a successful management phenomenon that Harvard University’s prestigious business school uses it as a case study even though dabbawallas are either illiterate or semi-literate.

“The secret to our business is that we use our skills to our advantage,” said Raghunath Medge, president of Nutan and a third-generation dabbawalla, and despite never having completed high school, can spit out management jargon with lightning speed. “We’re all uneducated, but we do much better than educated people because we rely on our excellent memories and on physical labour, both areas in which the educated need assistance.”

The business started in 1880 with just 25 customers. Today, Nutan has a website, accepts orders via email and even hosted Prince Charles when he visited India a few years ago.

What brings together this community of box labourers isn’t necessarily the profession but the labourers’ ethnic and communal ties. All hail from the same area outside the Maharashtran city of Pune, 170 kilometres from Mumbai.

Vital Savanth, 33, has been a dabbawalla for 13 years, like his father and grandfather before him. He bikes a three-kilometre route for his daily collection of 20 boxes.

“This is a good job,” said Savanth. “We work hard moving the boxes onto and off the trains, but we’re quick and we enjoy our work.”

For Deepti Trivedi, whose husband and daughter work as lawyers in the city’s financial district, the service is a godsend.

“I’ve been using the dabbawalla service for the past four years. I send home-cooked food because it’s so much healthier and more nutritious than restaurant food, and it’s also much cheaper.”

At Andheri station in Mumbai’s northern suburbs, a few dozen dabbawallas bring their boxes together every morning and sort them on the platform according to the code.

Prabhakar Laxman Adhawa, 55, has been delivering the boxes for 35 years. Both his sons also work as dabbawallas. “I knew all about the business before I came here. It was a guaranteed job when I got to the city because we work as a community and we look out for one another. This has been my first and only job in all these years.”

Adhawa also pointed to dignity of self-employment as one reason for his happiness.

“Look, with our education we could be workers in an office earning a paltry salary or working as a servant in someone’s house. This way we employ ourselves, and we earn a decent income.”

Popularity: 4% [?]

Mass conversions spark violence in India, but rival tribes’ quest for state funds also at play
September 22, 2008
SONYA FATAH

The Toronto Star

KANDHAMAL, India–Rabindranath Pradhan grabbed his wife and son and took shelter amid the lentil stalks of a nearby field.
Cowering in fear, Pradhan, 45, who had left his paralyzed brother inside the house, watched as 200 right-wing Hindu youngsters entered his brother’s bedroom, poured gasoline over his body, and burned him alive.
“I could hear him screaming for me to save him, but I was unable to move,” said Pradhan, recounting the horror of his brother’s suffering on Aug. 24. Unarmed and outnumbered, Pradhan and his neighbours could only watch as his brother’s shrieks faded and their homes and church were burnt to the ground.
Afterwards, the area’s 37 Christian families took refuge in the nearby hills. While torching their homes, the crowd had chanted “Jai Bajrang Dal!” revealing themselves as members of the youth brigade of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a right-wing group that aims to cleanse the Hindu soul of mother India and end the slaughter of cows and conversions to Islam and Christianity across the country.
Increasing conversions to Christianity in Kandhamal, one of India’s most “backward” regions, have triggered a reaction among India’s right-wing Hindu organizations.
Foreign and local missionary groups of varying denominations have been proselytizing in the area for decades, but now they’re facing a staunch Hindu right that’s determined to counter Christian missionary zeal with a bit of their own.
What’s happening in Kandhamal, however, is also a struggle between two dominant tribal groups over acceptance into India’s complex affirmative action system, which gives communities defined as “backward” better access to education and jobs.
The targeting of Christians, their homes and places of worship began after the murder of VHP leader Swami Laxmiananada Saraswati on Aug. 23. Although the government blamed Maoists, VHP leaders and the Bajrang Dal blamed militant Christians and set about taking revenge. Since Aug. 24, at least 20 people have been killed, countless houses burnt and at latest count 20,000 people had taken shelter in relief camps under the protection of regular police deployments, paramilitary squads and riot police.
Kandhamal, in India’s eastern state of Orissa, is an unlikely place for a religious confrontation. Lush green valleys dotted with small fields of rice paddies and lentil plantations are flanked by forested hills. On the face of it, its villages demonstrate religious harmony; their short commercial stretches boasting both churches and temples. Beneath the surface, however, tension has been building.
Many in Orissa’s political establishment trace the problem to Christian missionary work.
“So much money comes into the state for missionary efforts,” said MP Tathagata Sathpathy, a member of the ruling Biju Janata Dal party. “These guys offered Dalits better chances by offering them jobs, free education and other benefits … That’s one reason why there have been mass conversions to Christianity.”
Kandhamal’s people rely mostly on subsistence farming to survive. Some 650,000 people live in the area, according to the 2001 census. Members of the Kandha tribe are predominantly Hindu. The Panos, who were Dalits, the lowest in the Hindu caste hierarchy, have over the years embraced Christianity.
Orissa is 95 per cent Hindu. Christians only make up 2.5 per cent of the population. But in Kandhamal district, Christians make up roughly 25 per cent of the population.
Since Saraswati’s death, they’ve been hounded, killed and made to retreat from the areas that have been their homes for centuries.
“It’s not simply a religious issue,” said a district official in Kandhamal. “Religion is being used for this purpose, but essentially the Kandhas and the Panos are fighting for access to (job) reservations.”


Popularity: 5% [?]

A view of the vineyards at Sula Vineyards, one of India’s largest wine producers, with 1,800 acres under cultivation with 10 varietals.

Wine made its debut in the 1980s but country’s economic boom has seen vineyards mushroom

September 01, 2008
SONYA FATAH
The Toronto Star

NASIK, India–Rows of grape vines wrapped around steel frames are set in long, neat lines that stretch across the expanse on this side of the horizon.

The varietals are common: Chenin Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Red Zinfandel, Merlot to name a few. But this is not old wine country. Set against the rolling green plains around Nasik, a sort of Napa Valley in western India, this is Sula Vineyards, one of India’s largest wine producers with 1,800 acres under cultivation and 10 varieties of whites, reds, roses and dessert wines to offer the Indian consumer.

Wine is not new to India. Its oldest vineyards – Château Indage and Grover Vineyards – have been around since the 1980s. But the wine industry has only mushroomed after Sula’s entry, a change that is partially attributed to its founder, Rajeev Samant, a 41-year-old Stanford-university educated engineer turned winemaker, who set his sight on the potential a boom in wine consumption. But it’s also partially attributable to a growing economic boom in the country.

Indeed, as India has rolled into the 21st century with consumers ready to spend their rising disposable income on fine dining and wining, the business of wine making has become quite the in-thing. In the state of Maharashtra alone a handful of wineries have found more than two-dozen new neighbours.

“The future for Indian wine is very bright,” said David Banford, who heads the Wine Society of India, an organization that promotes wine education through information sessions, courses and wine tastings. Banford and his partners first started such a concept in the United States — the Wine Society of America — when the U.S. still had an unfriendly attitude toward wine. Today, the U.S. is the world’s largest consumer of wine. India, too, is headed in that direction, Banford said.

“Wine culture is here to stay. People here see wine as part of a civilized, western-oriented lifestyle.”

Of course, consumption in India is still quite marginal, making up 1 per cent of total alcohol sales by volume. About 1.2 million cases of wine are consumed annually, but the national alcohol diet is heavily skewed in favour of beer and liquor. By comparison, more than 70 million cases of beer and 70 million cases of spirits are consumed annually. Simply said, there are about 5 million wine consumers compared with 300 million liquor consumers.

If those numbers don’t impress, the rate at which the wine industry is rapidly growing surely will.

Since Samant harvested and fermented grapes for his introductory round of bottled wines, his business has increased by many multiples. That year — in 2000 — some 5,000 cases of wine were consumed across India. Today, Sula Wines contributes 250,000 to India’s one million plus consumption total.

Add to this a change in tired, old laws disallowing wine licenses and a 2005 move to delink wine and liquor in some states, have made inroads in changing perceptions about wine.

In some Indian states big supermarkets can now carry wines extending the influence of sellers to India’s large middle and upper-middle class.

Of course, the savvy Samant is also a keen marketer of his wines. At Sula Vineyards he has a tasting room with an outdoor patio overlooking the vineyard. He’s also started an annual harvest festival at the vineyard’s amphitheatre, which he designed. By October a trattoria restaurant will have opened serving vegetarian Italian food, Nasik’s first Italian restaurant. Recently he also started renting out Beyond, a three-bed bungalow where visitors can enjoy the green pastures of India’s wine country.

Samant’s success aside, developing a wine culture in India has been a slow process. Most men here drink beer and spirits and women form a minuscule portion of the country’s drinking population. For wine lovers and businessmen, the negative publicity around alcoholism and drinking hard liquor may do wonders for the image of wine in India.

Wine makers are trying hard to present it as a healthy alternative, one that can be savoured by men and women. Anecdotal examples of their success can be seen among the young men and women who drive out to Sula’s vineyards to taste its wines or who are becoming regulars at specialty wine stores that have propped up in some of the country’s metros. Samant himself is a partner in Saunte, a chain of wine stores in Mumbai and Pune that sell domestic and imported wines.

Château Indage, too, has a wine bistro, Ivy, in Mumbai and a series of specialist wine stores.

The newness and the range are allowing India’s upwardly mobile youth to experiment with changing tastes.

At the outdoor patio bar at Sula, three young men, all recent medical school graduates, ordered three different wines and sat discussing the differences in bouquets among their chosen drinks; a glass each of shiraz, red zinfandel and rose.

“We used to think that roses were a girl’s drink,” said Nikhil Pawar, 22, who hails from neighbouring Nasik, and who, on his third visit to Sula Vineyards, had dragged along two other friends. “But we’re experimenting with all sorts of wines now. We want to know what is the difference between dry and semidry, and whites and reds.”

For his friend, Saurabh Shivishkar, a 22-year-old medical resident in Mumbai, an afternoon at the vineyards brought out the romantic in him.

“I can just imagine myself travelling between Bordeaux and Marseille and stopping here in between. It feels like heaven. It’s such beautiful country. The clouds, the countryside, the wine.”

Young men like Pawar, Shivishkar and their friend are recent converts to wine. By Indian standards, Nasik with a population of just over one million according to the 2001 Indian national census, is a second-tier city after the more cosmopolitan urban Indian centres like Mumbai, New Delhi and Bangalore. But ever since Samant and Sula Wines set their footprint in this area, Nasik has quickly become India’s fastest growing area for wine consumption.

The mini wine revolution isn’t restricted to elite urban consumers. Farmers on contract to sell wine grapes to vineyards like Sula and Château Indage, also in Maharashtra state, and are beginning to sample and enjoy the product of their labour.

“Many of the farmers around here drink wine now instead of liquor,” Samant said after presiding over a 10-year annual meeting with his contract farmers who previously plied the much less successful business of table grapes.

That means new drinkers are beginning to opt for wine over hard liquor. In Nasik, women, too are beginning to swirl goblets of wines grown virtually in their backyard.

“My mother never used to drink,” said Pawar. “She’d occasioning have a small rum with my father. But now she’ll have wine with her friends. Last year, she came to Sula Vineyards with 14 of her friends and they were all drinking wine.”

Popularity: 4% [?]

SONYA FATAH
THE TORONTO STAR, August 16, 2008

MUMBAI–”Antilia” isn’t the only skyscraper dotting the city’s long, curving, southern coastline. But this particular tower, on Altamont Rd. – one of the wealthiest and most expensive residential streets in all of India – is home to a particularly sensational project. India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, is building this 27-floor, 173-metre skyscraper as a home for his family.

Forbes rated the 50-year-old Ambani, India’s wealthiest industrialist and petrochemicals czar, as the world’s fifth richest man, with an estimated net worth of $43 billion. The half-constructed Antilia, named after a mythical Greek island, is Ambani’s demonstration of what he can do with that wealth.

India’s steadily rising financial elite lives like the rich and famous anywhere, but in Mumbai, where some 60 per cent of the population live in slums, Ambani’s fancy skyscraper isn’t leaving everyone breathless with awe.

With property prices going wild in the Indian financial capital, many residents fear the brash demonstration of wealth will rapidly destroy the charming architecture and culture of the city. But, for many young Indians, inspired by recent exhibitions of wealth, the scale of Antilia is a welcome change, a sign of India’s rise as a 21st-century financial city.

With shantytowns and slums within walking distance, Antilia has its share of critics.

“I just see it as a kind of rather public and vulgar kind of exhibitionism,” said Ram Chandra Guha, an Indian historian and social commentator. “It is in poor taste. It is telling the other citizens of Bombay (Mumbai) – I don’t care for you. I am so much greater than you.”

The new building is said to be a “green project,” complete with hanging gardens and large garden rooftop spaces. But it also features gymnasiums, rooftop helipads, six floors of parking, and an ice room where Ambani and his family – his wife, mother and three children – can cool off.

Newspaper reports stated that the project, slated at $2 billion, is the most expensive private home ever built. But sources close to the project insist the numbers have been inflated. Fearing negative publicity, the family has clammed up.

The project has caused concern among those who want to protect the architectural heritage of a city known to have one of the world’s largest surviving art deco neighbourhoods.

It doesn’t help that the 4,500-sq.-ft. plot of land upon which Antilia stands was bought way below market price from a trust that originally planned to build an orphanage for Mumbai’s countless orphans.

“Half of the city lives in slums. There is a desperate need to rectify that situation,” said a senior engineer who did not want to be named. “I think (Antilia is) disgraceful and disgusting … There’s a degree of callousness which I think is unbelievable… Even (Greek tycoon Aristotle) Onassis’s yacht wasn’t that lavish.”

But as the well-travelled and wealthy flock to Mumbai for jobs and to settle, many more Antilias – tall, spacious and offering views of the Arabian Sea – are on the rise.

“As an architect, I am concerned, because a project like Antilia appears to be a green project, but it is not green building,” said Akhter Chauhan, director of the Rizvi College of Architecture in Mumbai. “We like to promote sustainable architecture. Architecture that is humane and that is more humble.”

The Ambani family isn’t winning any points for humble living. But that’s okay with some Indians, who see Ambani as a pioneer leading India’s new generation of entrepreneurs and industrialists to believe they, too, can follow in his footsteps.

The Indian public, after all, has long held the Ambanis’ rags-to-riches story in awe. Ambani’s father, Dhirubhai, came from a poor, rural background, but used his business acumen and politicking skills to ensure his polyester business thrived at a time when the biggest companies were in the hands of the country’s elite old families.

Although many analysts later accused the senior Ambani of using underhanded, sometimes desperate and dirty, means to succeed, many Indians also saw him as a symbol of a new India in which futures didn’t have to be determined by class, caste and background.

Still, some see it as a nasty reminder of colonial life.

“The British and the maharajas used to live with great opulence,” said Pankaj Joshi, a conservation architect. “They had opal rooms and crystal rooms and pearl rooms. That was the lavishness of those days. It took a different form. Today, these businessmen are our new colonial rulers.”

THE AMBANI FAMILY
Mukesh Ambani, 50, is the son of the late Dhirubhai Ambani, India’s first successful rags-to-riches entrepreneur, who emerged from a small town in Gujarat state and gradually built his fortune in the polyester business.

Dhirubhai’s success earned him a great deal of respect in Indian business circles because he made his way through a tightly woven bureaucracy that was unfriendly to new entrants. His tactics – winning lucrative government licences by bribing high-level officers – were detailed by Australian writer Hamish MacDonald in The Polyester Prince. (The book is banned in India for its exposé.)

Dhirubhai’s company, Reliance Industries, which became publicly listed in 1977, is today worth a little over $85 billion.

Dhirubhai’s male heirs – his sons Mukesh and Anil, now 48 – fought each other for control over Dhirubhai Ambani’s empire after his death in 2002. Mukesh and Anil’s mother brokered a settlement between the brothers in 2005.

For years, Dhirubhai Ambani, his sons and their families, including senior staff at Reliance, lived in Sea Wind, a 22-floor building in Cuffe Parade, an elite residential neighbourhood in southern Mumbai. After the father’s death, when infighting between the two brothers made it difficult to live under the same roof, Mukesh Ambani, pictured below, set about building Antilia, where he will live with his children, wife, left, and mother, right.

Popularity: 5% [?]