Kris Khaira

The June 26, 2006 issue of TIME Magazine has a feature on globalisation in India that suggests its effects and the gap between the rich and the poor.

Excerpt:

Bombay’s Boom

Brash, messy and sexy, India’s biggest city embodies the nation’s ambition. How Bombay is shaping India’s future—and our own

By ALEX PERRY / BOMBAY

...

If you want to catch a glimpse of the new India, with all its dizzying promise and turbocharged ambition, then head to its biggest, messiest, sexiest city—Bombay. Home to 18.4 million people and counting, the city, formally known as Mumbai, is projected by 2015 to be the planet’s second most populous metropolis, after Tokyo. But it’s already a world of its own. Walk down its teeming streets, and you’ll encounter crime lords and Bollywood stars, sprawling slums and Manhattan-priced condos, and jam-packed bars where DJs play the music of the Punjab, bhangra—a pulsating sound track familiar to clubgoers in London and New York City. Bombay is where Wall Street gets equities analyzed, where Kellogg, Brown & Root sources kitchen staff for the U.S. Army in Iraq, and where your credit-card details may be stored—or stolen. It’s where a phone operator who calls herself Mary (but is really Meenakshi) sells Texans on two-week vacations that include the Taj Mahal and cut-rate heart surgery. Chances are those medical tourists will touch down in Bombay, since 40% of international flights to India land here, delivering thousands of new visitors every day—an increasing number of whom are staying for good. The reason is simple: to know Bombay is to know modern India. It’s the channel for a billion ambitions and an emblem of globalization you can reach out and touch, a giant city where change is pouring in and rippling out around the world.

This contrasts so much with a certain country south of India.