City of Dreams—Page 2
Bombay has brimmed with cocky entrepreneurs since the Portuguese took possession of seven malarial islands off the west Indian coast in 1534 and called them Good Bay, or Bom Baia. Big talk attracts big crowds, and five centuries of migration have made Bombay the largest commercial center between Europe and the Far East. It's still growing. The U.N. World Urbanization Prospects Report predicts that Bombay—now the world's fourth most populous metropolis—will be second only to Tokyo with 22.6 million people by 2015.

One result of the migration is that nobody actually comes from Bombay. Even families that have lived there for generations still refer to a village 1,000 miles away as home. That sense of a place apart is reinforced by geography and architecture. You cross the sea or an estuary to reach downtown. And once there, you find a British tropical city of Victorian railway stations, Art Deco apartment blocks and Edwardian offices. Christabelle Noronha, a p.r. executive who has lived in the city all her life, says the sense of being in a foreign land gives Bombay an uninhibited air: "If everyone is a stranger, then everyone is free." It's no accident, then, that the city is home to India's Mafia and—in its dance bars—its only over-ground sex industry.

But crime and sex are merely the most salacious examples of a wider phenomenon. Bombay is a city built on enterprise. "Pull anyone out of any part of India and put them in Bombay," says Rothschild's Bhandarkar, "and he'll acquire that sense of purpose." India's great industrialists—the Tatas, the Ambanis, the Godrejs—all began in Bombay. The nation's bankers, stockbrokers and traders head there, too: It's home to both the Bombay Stock Exchange and the National Stock Exchange of India, which together account for 92% of the country's total share turnover, as well as to the nation's central bank. Thousands of foreign brokerages, investment banks, mutual-fund firms and private-equity funds have set up their Indian headquarters in Bombay, including global powerhouses such as HSBC, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America. The nation's music industry and much of its media are based in Bombay, and it's also one of the centers of the global outsourcing boom. India's Hindi movie industry—Bollywood—and all its stars are based in Bombay, with huge film lots in the north of the city. Meanwhile, Bombay's port handles half of India's trade, and the nation's largest oil field, Bombay High, is just offshore. Such a concentration of business activity breeds a sophisticated, cosmopolitan outlook—hence Bombay has India's best hotels, bars, restaurants and nightclubs. And every day, according to the official census, another 200 people arrive in the city to seek their fortune.

Samant is one of this legion of strivers invigorating Bombay. When he left school 20 years ago, any Indian with ambition and means got out of the country, and Samant followed a well-trodden path to Stanford University and Oracle Corp. in Silicon Valley. Then, in 1991, Finance Minister (now Prime Minister) Manmohan Singh began to open up India, dismantling a creaking socialist command economy—the "license Raj"—that had chained the nation to poverty and stagnation since independence. Samant came home with a mad new plan: to make wine in a country where alcohol was a sin and hooch was the closest thing to a sophisticated intoxicant. Thirteen years later Samant runs Sula, India's largest winemaker, which produces more than a million bottles a year. And he lives large, employing a chauffeur and a manservant, holidaying in Europe and California, and dating and partying almost every night when he's in Bombay. To recap: Samant isn't married, he makes booze and he chucked in a dream job in the U.S to come home. Old Mother India would have a cow.

Samant is a son of privilege—privately educated, well connected. But Bombay takes all comers. To migrants from India's poor states, the metropolis is known as Mayanagri—the City of Dreams. To its slums come people from India's villages, hitching rides and dodging train fares, prepared to sell spicy peanuts at traffic lights and pay $1 a month to live in a tin hut. For some of them, the principal opportunity the city offers is a life of crime—running bootlegging operations, gambling dens, or renting out the miserable hovels in which millions of Bombay's inhabitants still live (see box). Just as for Bombay's gilded élite, the city is the place to be. "I came from nothing," says one Bombay gangster who grew up in Bihar, India's poorest state. "Now I have money, phones, cars, houses, a wife and two girlfriends. If you were me, you'd love Bombay too."

The fairways of the exclusive Willingdon Club, where Samant is a member, may seem a world removed from the bars and back alleys of Bombay's slums, where business is done with little regard for the letter of the law. But they are closer than you might think. Samant, for one, acknowledges that plenty of respectable Indian businessmen find it necessary to take minor liberties with the rules. "If you try to run a business 100% within the law in this town," he says, "you're doomed." Whatever your status, it seems, pragmatism is a necessity in Bombay.

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