Mumbai

The gap between the poor and the rich is probably nowhere greater than in Mumbai. The most expensive private house in the world stands here while 60 percent of the population battles daily for survival.

Mumbai’s Killesberg (an exclusive hillside residential area in Stuttgart) lies in the south on Altamount Road. This hilly neighbourhood is the site of the world’s most expensive single family home. I cannot bend my head back far enough to really see this entire monstrosity. On a hill at the southern tip of the city, billionaire Mukesh Ambani had his cottage built, better said a gigantic high-rise. It is like a foreign body between the houses from the Colonial age with their crumbling stucco.

There is no accounting for taste. Illuminated by night, the 27-storey UFO of Ambani looks better than by day, when you have to be amazed at the misshapen skyscraper. The facts: 173 metres high, 4,500 square metres of space, plenty of room for the kids to play in. Mukesh Ambani is one of the world’s richest people, with 27 billion US dollars the ninth most wealthy according to the Forbes list. Anyone good at the rule of three can now easily calculate the percentage of his fortune that he spent if it is true that the building cost approximately 70 million dollars. I can’t; there are too many zeros. Yet, I can imagine how happy Mrs Ambani must have been when she saw that her new home not only had three swimming pools, a Jacuzzi, solarium, yoga studio and spa falderal, but even a room where snow falls from the ceiling. That feels good, a cool-down in the muggy, smoggy city air.

The plump Ambani children invite their friends to their private cinema for their birthdays, romp in the hanging gardens and look down at the smog of the city: lovely. If one of the invited kiddies scrapes a knee playing cricket, they can get a plaster from their private clinic. Maybe right when Baba lands on his helicopter pad.

Here, at the foot on the Ambani house, the absurdity of the city manifests itself; a city in which 60 percent of the people are destitute and live on not even 100 euros a month, Mumbai is also the city of turbo-capitalism. One square metre of property on Altamount Road costs more than 10,000 US dollars. And it is not as if everything is spic and span here. Here, too, people live between rubbish on the street.

Mumbai is everything. Most of all, it is cramped. Mumbai was not built on seven hills, but on a marshland. And the city is growing daily. The Mumbaikar have an eminent space problem, which is why they are building upwards and would prefer to turn the Dharavi slum, which the city is sprawling around, into a residential area with even more skyscrapers. Architect Mukesh Mehta though up the urban plan for it. They want to force the Dharavi inhabitants to resettle. In the city of turbo-capitalism there is no place for the poor, who often clean, wash and cook in the homes of the rich. Mumbai is too small. Its south is surrounded by water on three sides. It can only grow to the north, but the south is the seat of the powerful, the world of finance and therefore the money.

I notice it often: no one envies the success of the beautiful and the wealthy. The wealthy aren’t bothered by the poor, but the poor are also not bothered by the wealthy. For example, if I question the necessity of a 27-storey house for a wife, three children and a grandmother in a conversation, people brush it off with, “Oh, he needs the space.”

Here in Mumbai, there is not just an XXL-size Killesberg, there is also Bandra, the trendy district, where hotels like the Taj Mahal Lands stand on the dirty beach and Bollywood stars show off their absurd palaces. There is Juhu Beach, its Frauenkopf (a coveted wooded residential area in Stuttgart), which is not on a hilltop, but by the sea. More millionaires live in the megacity of Mumbai than in Manhattan. Two weeks ago, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet visited India and they said something crazy on television: that the wealthy in India ought to give the poor some of their money. Yet, here the question of social responsibility is only answered with: never heard of it. The Maserati roaring past the slum is part of normal life.

One of the biggest Bollywood celebrities who smiles so congenially from all the billboards is Amitabh Bachchan. He is actually an actor, but also hosted the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? While the host of the German counterpart show, Günther Jauch, is said to be very frugal and would never show off his wealth, here in India everyone knows how and where Bollywood’s elite lives. They wait in front of his house; sometimes he comes out and waves at his fans.

On this lovely warm evening, the girls in colourful saris are sitting on the wall in front of Shah Rukh Khan’s house, the sea to their backs, their eyes on the modern, ludicrous palace in which they say a few friends of Khan also live.
My new friend Aneesh also likes Shah Rukh Khan. Everyone loves Shah Rukh Khan. “He’s just King Khan,” Aneesh says. They tell a nice legend about this king here in Mumbai. When he was a small boy, they say he pointed at a spot in Bandra and said “Mannat.” Today, the word is on the iron gate to his driveway by the beach in Bandra. “Mannat” means something like pipe dream.