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Five centuries after the first foreigners arrived, Bombay is once again attracting fortune seekers from far away. Yana Gupta's journey began in Brno, Czechoslovakia, in 1988 when she was 9 and her mother Dedenka stitched money and jewelry into her two daughters' clothes and took them on vacation to Croatia. "On the bus on the way back to Czechoslovakia," remembers Gupta, "we got down somewhere and went into some forest. The idea was to get to Germany. But the border guards caught us." The next year, Vaclav Havel led Czechoslovakia's revolution. But Gupta's mother had sown the seeds of escape deep in her daughter. By 15, Gupta was modeling in Prague. By 17, it was Milan. And by 19, she was sharing a models' flat in Tokyo. "It was a great experience," she says. "I was learning English and making money. And when I was 21, I came to India for a vacation, met someone in an ashram, and in two months I married him."
Gupta later separated from her husband. But she stuck with Bombay, and the city quickly became attached to her. She did her first fashion shoot in January 2001, and within three months she was signed as the face of Lakme cosmetics. Today she is India's top model, representing Christian Dior, 7Up and Kingfisher Airlines. She has an annual calendar and a song-and-dance show, and is a fixture on the gossip pages; a book and an album are up next.
Gupta is the most prominent of the foreigners who have moved to Bombay yet is far from alone. The last official count in 2005 estimated that there were just 30,000 foreigners working in India, but that number is rocketing. Delhi-based market researcher Evalueserve says an additional 120,000 are needed by 2010 to fill the skills shortage in the IT industry alone, and Bombay real estate agents report that foreigners are fueling a run on luxury properties. The reason for the influx, says Gupta, is that anyone in any profession can rise faster and higher in Bombay than almost anywhere else. The author E.B. White said, "No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky," which could just as easily be said of Bombay today. Says Gupta: "That's the thing about Bombay. It's the place of possibility."
That promise is luring others home. When Samant left school 20 years ago, any Indian with ambition and means got out, and Samant followed a well-trodden path to Stanford and on to Oracle in California's Silicon Valley. Then in 1991 Singh, at the time the country's Finance Minister, began to open up India, dismantling a creaking socialist command economy that had chained India to poverty and stagnation since independence. Samant returned home with a mad new plan: to make wine in a country where alcohol was taboo and the closest thing to sophisticated intoxication was hooch. Thirteen years later, Samant runs Sula, one of India's largest vintners, producing more than a million bottles a year. And he lives large, employing a chauffeur and a butler, vacationing in Europe and California, and partying every night in Bombay.