City of Dreams

The streets are wet with the dew of the coming monsoon as Rajeev Samant unveils his latest triumph in midtown Bombay. The Tasting Room is a soft-lit tapas bar built into a high-end furniture store in the city's old textile district. The idea is to showcase Samant's range of Indian wines in an environment that oozes class and cash, and with bottles costing twice the average Indian weekly wage, Samant means it to be exclusive. Tonight the 39-year-old founder of one of the country's largest vintners, Sula Vineyards, is hosting a group from Insead, the French business school, who are visiting India to see what all the buzz is about. Over Samant's Chenin Blanc and Reserve Shiraz, a handful of Bombay's traders and venture capitalists swap gossip with the students about who met whom when actor Will Smith and Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg were in town a few months back. "You're so lucky to be here now," says Samant. "This is an incredible time. It's all happening. Right here, right now."

If there's a crucible of the new India, it's Bombay. Bangalore gets plenty of attention for its IT campuses and dotcom billionaires, but you wouldn't confuse Seattle with New York. Bombay is where the nation's first Rolls-Royce showroom opened in late May. It's home to the Bombay Stock Exchange Sensitive Index, which—even after its recent nosedive—has more than doubled in the past two years. It's where 40% of Indian tax is paid, where 40% of international flights land, where Time Out chose to launch a local edition and where Enrique Iglesias played India. It's the hometown of crime lords and Bollywood stars, sprawling slums and Manhattan-price condos, and of some of the hippest clubs and bars from Beirut to Bangkok. And with a population of 18.4 million, it's a world of its own. It hosts conventions for Japanese bankers and Brazilian anti-globalization protesters. It is where the U.S. Army sources its kitchen staff for the war in Iraq, and where your credit-card details might be stored or stolen. It's where club DJs steal back bhangra, the music of the Punjab, from London and New York. And it's a highbrow haven where British-Indian novelist Vikram Seth mixed the sensibilities of Charles Dickens with a little Indian spice to make the modern classic A Suitable Boy. To know Bombay is to know modern India. It is the channel for a billion ambitions. And it's globalization you can touch and walk around, a giant city where change is pouring in and rippling out around the globe.

What makes this dynamism all the more stunning is that it exists in spite of India's political and bureaucratic dysfunction. Ironically, for Bombay bad government may have meant good business. Decades of inept and sometimes corrupt rule have produced a city of self-starters. Sanjay Bhandarkar, managing director of Rothschild's India, says the city is a "disaster" in terms of government: "From that point of view, there are absolutely no arguments for being based in Bombay." But lack of state backup has helped to create an exceptionally able talent pool for employers. "The quality of the workforce is amazing," he says. "Things just happen here, because people have to make things work themselves." Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, a billionaire stock investor based in Bombay, says that with liberalization, the central government has sufficiently reduced its role in managing the economy that it can be virtually ignored. Bosses can now devote their energies to straightforward business, rather than outwitting the bureaucracy. That's not to say the government is actively helping. "Right now, India is like a runner without shoes," says Jhunjhunwala. "But look at that speed."

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.