Bright Lights, Big Mumbai
By ALEX KUCZYNSKI
Published: September 23, 2007
On an April evening in pre-monsoon Mumbai, India, about 600 of the city’s glitterati gathered in the ballroom of the Taj Mahal Hotel Palace and Tower for a fashion show. Waiters in white jackets passed flutes of Champagne and trays of caviar. Like any other large city, Mumbai has its highly visible reigning class, the wealthy people who want to be seen — in contrast to the wealthy people who will do anything to remain unseen. This night’s audience was composed of the former group, dressed in their latest couture purchased on their last jaunts to Europe, professionally lacquered and coiffed, turning their angular chins and dermatologically plumped lips at pleasant angles for the photographers there to capture Mumbai’s blossoming beau monde.
Pop! There were Yash and Avanti Birla, the 30-something couple who had posed for the cover of Indian L’Officiel, a popular society magazine, the previous month. For the evening, Yash, a member of one of India’s leading industrial families, wore blue jeans and a sleeveless mesh T-shirt, through which his nipples were visible.
“He’s not your typical Indian dresser,” said his wife, in highlighted hair and Christian Louboutin shoes. They waved to Karan Johar, a young filmmaker and talk-show host. The photographers scurried over like a pack of panicked beetles. Flash! The SLRs clicked furiously as Parmeshwar Godrej, a fixture of Page 3, the celebrity- and socialite-obsessed gossip page of The Times of India, walked in wearing a sequined beret and looking very much like a brunet Donatella Versace. The previous month, Godrej, a reigning queen of Mumbai society, had hosted the party of the season — the wedding celebration for Elizabeth Hurley and her Mumbai-bred husband, Arun Nayar. The crowd was still chattering on about it.
The lights dimmed and a video, courtesy of the Centurion Bank of Punjab, was projected onto a large screen. A voice-over intoned,
“It’s not easy to live a superlative life.” James Bond theme music played as actors portraying wealthy young Indians stepped from limousines, flashing nuclear-white dental veneers and toasting one another with goblets of red wine. Young women strolled through the audience passing out pamphlets explaining the bank’s trust and estate services.
When the lights went up, Shobhaa Dé, a model-turned-romance novelist as well as a lifestyle columnist for The Times of India, and the wife of one of Mumbai’s wealthiest men and the fashion designer behind the evening’s real entertainment, stepped to the microphone. Dé, her long black hair flowing and a red bindi (symbolizing marriage and love) marking her forehead, introduced her new sari collection. She explained that they were meant to be a contemporary turn on the garment, which Indian women have worn since before the birth of Christ. “These are fun, these are powerful, but above all, they are sexy,” she said as the models began to move down the catwalk, their torsos seemingly unattached to their legs, which traced lazy figure eights along the stage.
http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/travel/tmagazine/10well-mumbai-t.html?pagewanted=1&ref=travel
Some of the saris showed the crest of the buttocks, while others soared in potentially scandalous slits up the thigh. But there were no signs of protest from the crowd. This isn’t Delhi, where public outcry ensued after Richard Gere recently planted a public kiss on the actress Shilpa Shetty at a fund-raiser. This is Mumbai, the commercial and entertainment center of India and the country’s fastest-growing city, home to more and more millionaires and Maybachs and restaurants and nightclubs and strip bars and movie studios and immigrants and luxury-goods stores every day. And its citizens — or some of the privileged ones, at least — are eating it up, embracing the explosion of luxury culture. The city is home to the kind of shopping one could find on Rodeo Drive, as well as the kind of ferocious poverty that defines the third world.
And unlike the first world, where the poor are cordoned off from the rich, here the wealthy and impoverished live in much of the city flank by flank, with patched-together shanties propped up next to gleaming apartment towers and housemaids returning to their tarpaulin shacks 100 feet from the air-conditioned bedrooms where their employers sleep on Pratesi sheets.
Founded as a fishing village that later prospered as a trading port, Mumbai is, in fact, a city of physical parts as well. Made up of seven islands on the Arabian Sea, the capital of the Indian state of Maharashtra is positioned on the western shore of the subcontinent, below the armpit of Gujarat. It has been known throughout history by many names: in the 16th century the Portuguese called it both Bom Bahia, meaning “good bay,” and Boa Vida, “good life.” The Hindus knew it as Manbai, Mumbadevi and Bambai. In 1995, the Hindu nationalist party governing Maharashtra announced that Bombay, the Anglicized name the British had given the city in the 17th century, would henceforth be known by its Marathi name, Mumbai, to refer to the Hindi goddess Mumbadevi and to Aai, which means “mother.” At the same time, the political party Shiv Sena also tried to eliminate the term “Bollywood,” which conflates the name of Bombay with Hollywood, but with no success.