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Whether Bombay's entrepreneurial energy can be directed toward lifting more of its people out of despair will help define the nation's future. The country's pro-growth Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, has said he dreams that Bombay will someday make people "forget Shanghai"--China's financial capital, whose modern gleam is a reminder of the gap between India and its eastern rival. Right now it's not much of a contest. India's GDP (gross domestic product) growth was 8.4% last year vs. 10% for China, while foreign investment in India was an estimated $8.4 billion, compared with $72.4 billion in China.
But India does possess one indispensable asset, which has sustained its democracy and catapulted it to the cusp of global power: the ingenuity of its citizens. And nowhere is it in greater supply than in Bombay. "Things just happen here," says Sanjay Bhandarkar, managing director of investment bank Rothschild's India. "Because people have to make things work themselves." The rise of China has been the product of methodical state planning, but India's is all about private hustle, a trait that Americans can appreciate. Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, a billionaire trader in Bombay, says initiative represents Bombay's--and India's--advantage over its competitors. "It's people who make countries," he says, "not governments."
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. Nobody actually comes from Bombay. Even families who have lived there for generations still refer to an ancestral 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 tropical British 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," she says.
As the subcontinent's New York City, Bombay is built not on tradition but on drive. "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 city's stock exchanges account for 92% of the country's total share turnover, and the nation's central bank and hundreds of brokerages and investors have set up their Indian headquarters there, including such global powerhouses as HSBC, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America. Bombay's port handles half of India's trade, and its southern business district is one of the centers of the global outsourcing boom. India's music industry and much of its media are based in Bombay, as is India's Hindi film industry, Bollywood. 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, hundreds move to the city to seek their fortune.