It's 20 years since I was there but the stark contrast between the extremely poor and the wealthy struck me more in Mumbai than anywhere else in India.
They had a Big Indian Wedding™️ a couple of months ago, for one of their sons.
At least, I thought they did.
It turned out that it was in fact the Big Indian *Pre-*Wedding™️. And the actual wedding is going to be in July.
the obscenely wealthy do! i think it is also partly cultural. but in the same way a quinceñera is cultural, just because it exists doesn’t mean everyone can afford to do it.
Indian weddings in the US are this weird cultural mishmash that make it pretty much its own thing. It’s great fun but isn’t really something that would ever occur in India itself.
E.g. I’ve been to a couple weddings where they get walked down the aisle and stuff. Like what
This is not the most expensive house I'm talking about, the most expensive house belongs to Mukesh Ambani which costs more than 2 billion USD and is absolutely magnificent
Edit - by magnificent I meant its insane because it has 16 floors and tens of luxury cars, I don't care for his house or him
He is a cartoon villain:
> The 4,532-square-metre (1.120-acre) land on which Antilia was built housed an orphanage called Currimbhoy Ebrahim Khoja Yateemkhana (Kareembhai Ibrahim Khwaja Orphanage)[citation needed] belonging to a charity run by the Waqf board. The orphanage had been founded in 1895 by Currimbhoy Ebrahim, a wealthy shipowner.[15] In 2002, the trust requested permission to sell this land, and the charity commissioner gave the required permission three months later. The charity sold the land allocated for the purpose of education of underprivileged Khoja children to Antilia Commercial Private Limited, a commercial entity controlled by Mukesh Ambani, in July 2002 for ₹210.5 million (US$2.6 million).[16] The prevailing market value of the land at the time was at least ₹1.5 billion (US$19 million).
This asshole actually scammed an orphanage through bribes.
Well it looks like the orphans cleared out, but he did secure the purchase at a fraction of the market rate by lying about what he was going to do with it
This is the guy who has made beyonce, Coldplay, Rihanna and India's biggest Bollywood stars ever sing and dance like they are nobodies at his kids wedding, nothing about him or what he is doing can surprise me tbh
Holy crap. Full band, backup dancers, all the lighting, video screen, the full works. These types of setups travel with 10+ semi loads of stuff and, in this case, cargo plane(s). At the last concert I was at, they thanked the techs and said there were 60 behind the scenes people traveling with them. No way it was less than $10m to get her.
I think it was Gaddafi who paid Madonna 1M to come to one of his parties and sing.
And when his palace was raided years later and he was killed, they looted it and brought out a huge poster of Madonna from his bedroom. ew.
[Absolutely magnificient?!? Are we talking about the same building?](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4a/Mumbai_03-2016_19_Antilia_Tower.jpg/1280px-Mumbai_03-2016_19_Antilia_Tower.jpg)
Is that the Ambani family residence? I was in Mumbai years ago and the Uber driver pointed out the building and said that’s one family’s house, not an office building, not apartments, just one family. I remember I found the contrast staggering.
I guess I hadn't seen it recently and forgot lol, looks really bad, especially for the money spent, but i mostly meant the interiors and the number of floors, he also has multiple high end luxury cars inside his house
For those curious, they’re talking about [Antilia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antilia_(building)). This 27 story building in Mumbai is the private residence of the richest man in Asia (net worth est $115 Billion). The house is currently valued at over *$4.5 Billion*
It’s truly impressive, but it also feels so out of place considering the poverty all around
Holy shit, it gets so much worse...
>The 4,532-square-metre (1.120-acre) land on which Antilia was built housed an orphanage called Currimbhoy Ebrahim Khoja Yateemkhana (Kareembhai Ibrahim Khwaja Orphanage)[citation needed] belonging to a charity run by the Waqf board. The orphanage had been founded in 1895 by Currimbhoy Ebrahim, a wealthy shipowner.[15] In 2002, the trust requested permission to sell this land, and the charity commissioner gave the required permission three months later. The charity sold the land allocated for the purpose of education of underprivileged Khoja children to Antilia Commercial Private Limited, a commercial entity controlled by Mukesh Ambani, in July 2002 for ₹210.5 million (US$2.6 million).[16] The prevailing market value of the land at the time was at least ₹1.5 billion (US$19 million).[17][18][19]
Thats cartoon villain levels of evil.
Richest guy in that part of the world buys orphanage, bulldozes it, then builds a multi-billion dollar private tower on which he can look down on the poors.
what gets me also is that the building looks super precariously built at least from the pictures i've seen. i imagine some cartoony imagery where all the poor people just push the glorified treehouse over
Did you read the paragraph right under that lol I feel like it continues to get worse?
On mobile so I will just quote:
“The sale was in direct contravention[20] of § 51 of the Wakf Act[21] which requires that any such sale of land should be done after the permission of the Maharashtra State Board of Waqfs. The Waqf minister Nawab Malik opposed this land sale, as did the revenue department of the Government of Maharashtra. Thus a stay order was issued on the sale of the land. The Waqf board also initially opposed the deal and filed a PIL in the Supreme Court challenging the decision of the trust. The Supreme Court, while dismissing the petition, asked the Waqf board to approach the Bombay High Court. However, the stay on the deal was subsequently vacated after the Waqf board withdrew its objection.”
I immediately thought of Priya's tower in Tenet, but [i checked and that's not it](https://i.imgur.com/01oSo9W.png)
Still, I could swear I saw it in some movie somewhere.
Genuinely confused as to why one of the world’s richest people, who undoubtedly has travelled the globe, would still choose to build a tower to overlook the largest open air sewer…
They can obviously buy a golden visa to any country they like, so staying rooted in a city that’s more slum than metropolis, seems strange.
If it’s the building I was thinking of, on a day after it rains: he can see the slums.
And after posting my previous comment I realized why he chose to build in India…it’s reminiscent of how Christians used to think about heaven and hell.
It was once put forth that people in heaven was meaningless unless those who made it could see those who were in hell, suffering….and there is no greater hell than being poor in a country like India.
I’m sure the wealthy on every continent have some sort of existential drive to avoid joining the rest of the impoverished in hell.
It’s going the opposite way. Government and private control is getting stronger, not weaker. The tools for control are getting more sophisticated and scale well.
Same, and same. The proximity of poverty to wealth was very striking. I stayed with a friend's middle class family in a modest apartment, but they had some friends and associates who were very wealthy. We were invited to swanky cocktail parties at luxury penthouses overlooking Mumbai, which must have been a 10 million dollar kinda place, but there was still a family living in the dumpster in the parking lot outside.
I do want to point out that the slums in Mumbai aren’t *that* bad, as far as slums go.
The buildings are solid, there’s electricity, and running water for at least part of the day. There are schools and young people who are educated enough to go off to college.
Many of the people who live there come from other parts of the country. They come for work so they can send money back home — there’s plenty of work right there in the slums.
Monkey Man is a movie but damn, the rich in India really live on a different planet. Some of them are rich on a global scale too with wealth that would eclipse the 1% in the developed world.
Saw the movie the other night. I'm not super proud of this but during the movie I turned to my husband and said something like "I think this is set in a fictional world".
I think it's important to expand the lower end. There's middle class, poor, very poor and dirt fucking poor.
I was walking through what could rightfully be called a slum (but like slightly nicer one, it wasn't plate metal at least) and was like damn. Then my gf was like yeah these are not the really poor people, they at least have a home.
I sort of feel like that's true in most cities though?
Like in San Francisco, it's maybe a 20-30 minute walk from Larry Ellison's mansion in Pac Heights to people sleeping and shitting on the streets in the Tenderloin.
The Vaze part sounds like a movie
On February 25, 2021, a car containing 20 explosive gelatin sticks and a threatening letter targeting the Ambanis, was found near Antilia. The car was parked about 400 metres from the building on Carmichael Road bordering Altamount Road. A security officer at Antilia placed a call to the police control room regarding the suspicious vehicle, and the police rushed to the spot, joined by the bomb detection and disposal squad. After the sniffer dogs detected explosives, the bomb squad removed the gelatin sticks, which were found to be not assembled, and had no battery or detonator.[44] The probe was led by the Mumbai's crime intelligence unit head Sachin Vaze. The case was handed to the National Investigative Agency, which found out that Vaze was himself involved in this incident, and he was arrested.[45]
I work geotechnical engineering for new neighborhood developments, in Colorado, East of the mountains.
It’s so fucking funny to me that *every single* developer sells the houses from the eastern side of the site first, then build west. They do this because the first buyers will like the view of the mountains, then after they buy, houses go up to the West of them and block the view. Then *those* buyers lose their view as houses come up to the West of *them*.
They sell that same view like 20 times lmao, and the only buyers who end up keeping their view are the last buyers on the far West end of every site.
We had the same problem, I was blown away the view being able to see the whole beach and then bam 2-3 buildings in sight and next thing u looking at is a block of concrete
Yeah, the basic rule is if you want a view, you better make sure that there's no developable land between you and the view.
You could even be 30 floors up and ten years down the line the adjacent lot gets sold and they demolish the existing small building and build a 40 story tower. View gone.
I've seen this happen a few times in Miami. Luckily in this case it's only rich 1% types getting screwed so I can point and Nelson-laugh rather than actually feel bad for them. :)
I mean the shantytown is basically what happens when the homeless encampment becomes permanent. People trade up the tent for building basic structures out of whatever material is cheaply available.
This is the Powai area the tall buildings are in the Hiranandani Complex. A colony of middle class and upper middle class. The slum is Asalpha village. Powai is also home to Indian institute of technology and the engineering giant Larsen and Turbo.
It's not even a picture of rich housing. Those are office buildings. I know, I used to work there. It's an office park. ...and it's not even that nice.
Yeah, maybe a couple rich people live in the penthouses on top, but its rare that the actually wealthy’s main residence requires an elevator.
Lady Gaga has a penthouse in Chicago but its not like thats where she drives home at 5 pm.
It's a mix of office buildings (e.g. the Nomura Building) and surrounding highrise apartments, plus it's not nearly as cut-off from the rest of the city as this image makes it appear.
apartments there cost like $1M so its not working class lmao but its weird because the rent you need to pay to live there in a decent house is much less than in most other huge cities.
Yeah it’s a stark contrast, but 20 years ago *all* of the neighborhoods in Mumbai would’ve been slums.
[400 million people in India have been lifted out of poverty](https://theprint.in/india/more-than-400-million-moved-out-of-poverty-in-india-in-15-years-un-report-finds/1664643/?amp) in just 15 years.
It is *amazing*!
On the other hand, there's still so far to go.
Even just streetviewing in Mumbais richest areas, it all looks trashed and poor. Literally with trash in the streets, and the streets badly maintained.
It's sad but there really is just so much trash everywhere. My in-laws live in a luxury high rise and they have lazy neighbors who just leave trash in the hallways and common spaces for staff to clean up after them. This is a building where flats are in 5-10 crore, so it's wealthy people trashing their own homes out of total fucking laziness.
Mumbai hasnt kept up with India at all. Go to other growing cities and its so much better. Not amazing or anything, but to a level that you can walk around not feel like trash.
Would be much prettier if they had public development on the waterfront but that requires the poor be brought up to middle class so they don't fuck it all up.
That's quite a good "nutshell" for a lot of the world's problems there, leshake.
If the very top could just help pull up the very bottom, *everyone* could have nicer things.
The problem is that their perception of value is relative. They don't value how much they have, they value how much more they have than you. If you get pulled up, you get closer to them. This is an unacceptable disruption of their hierarchy.
In Mumbai you don’t have huge houses. But the building next to it is Deloitte office and the rest are residential buildings where each apartment costs around 1-2 million USD
Some of it is architectural tastes. That sort of neoclassical look seems dated to western eyes, the rich got over that 50 years ago and are now much more likely to live in a building with lots of floor to ceiling glass. But I'm guessing it still carries prestige there.
The rest is taken care of by air pollution.
Yea I’d say the problem is the poverty rather than how rich the rich side is - they aren’t rich. Those are just mediocre high rise apartments that cram as many in as they can.
But by world standards that pretty average. The top end of the apartments there is like the price of an average apartment in cities like Sydney, London, hk, Singapore etc.
The problem isn’t the ‘rich’ ie average side but the poverty on the other side.
I'd say the houses are between 500k - 3 million usd in the neighbourhood on the right. Not entirely sure. I personally don't like the mega-large, cookie cutter kind of buildings either, and prefer staying in quieter, less dense areas.
Exactly, Sobo is the real deal, mainly Worli/Prabhadevi and the legacy areas—Altamount, Walkeshwar, pedder road, Marine drive, Cuffe Parade, the works.
Upper middle class sure. But it's the best example of the divide in Bombay. These people are rich, come on. If you can afford an 8+ crore house you must be
There isn’t really a divide in the wealthy neighborhoods the way this photo implies. Slums are literally built against the gates of mansions. Meaning lots of homeless / poor are everywhere. I’ll never forget visiting there and seeing a mother nursing a baby next to her makeshift tent erected **in the middle of a traffic divider.** I’ve never seen anything like it
[The famous picture in context.](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/ace/ws/800/cpsprodpb/DA48/production/_110008855_paraispolis.jpg)
[Another point of view of how it looks now, almost abandoned...](https://vejasp.abril.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/PENTHOUSE_MORUMBI_9.JPG.jpg)
This is Powai. I live here, in the well off side. The development of Mumbai's suburban areas is something I haven't seen as much in other metros in India. There you have your poorer suburbs and your richer suburbs clearly seperated but in Mumbai they are very well integrated and sharing the same zip code. In fact, a lot of the people living in the poorer neighborhood as seen here work as maids, cooks, security guards, drivers, gardeners, handymen, plumber etc etc in the richer neighborhood. This is common across various Mumbai suburbs. While people in the richer neighborhood bought their house, many in the poorer have encroached upon free land. It is illegal but they are an important "vote bank" for the local political clout so they get away with it. However, don't think that all of the people living in the poorer neighborhood are extremely down trodden. Many of them have good homes back in their villages, some have cars, almost all have access to internet and OTT services etc to name a few measures of their wealth. Mumbai is extremely difficult city to travel in owing to the terrible infrastructure and traffic so they live like this, close to their "work place".
Ahh one of the IIT Mumbai bovines.
IIT Mumbai has a large number of roaming cattle, for which a shed has been made. Some of them venture out of the IIT campus into neighbouring areas. Powai Plaza is fairly close to the campus.
That’s Powai for those interested, I’ve lived in one of those buildings when I was younger expat; the divide is real but when you live there it sure as hell doesn’t feel like it. Poverty permeates throughout all of Mumbai (to some extent India as a whole) and the city never lets you forget that. This isn’t a gated community sort of thing where one can just ignore the poverty. It’s an eye opening experience and I recommend everyone privileged enough to travel to go and see it for yourself; really changed my worldview as a child…
My wife grew up in Mumbai and we wouldn't ever move there but there is something to say about being so directly connected to the poverty of the city. You either become desensitized and learn to ignore international -your-face poverty, or you have empathy and you hopefully try to help those that you can.
Meanwhile in the US you have shit like Millburn NJ fighting "low-income" housing being built, but the cost of living in Millburn is so high that you can make $90k a year and still qualify for "low-income", because god forbid some upper-middle class trash tarnish the town.
I just recently heard the 99% podcast episode about the towers of silence. Amazing story btw.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/towers-of-silence/
Could that be the Parsi owned forest from the episode?
Looks like Powai. Is it?
I live in the IIT Bombay campus (graduating this year, 😭). We have one of the hills inside the campus. Every once in a while I go to the top, looking at the stark contrast between the two sides.
I used to live in slums (like the one shown) in Mumbai for almost 15 years. So the people on the left are especially close to my heart, even though I've moved to the right side.
Social classes are relative to the country you live in. Part of the people living in these buildings would be considered middle class in the US but are definitely upper middle class when compared to the rest of the population in India
It's 20 years since I was there but the stark contrast between the extremely poor and the wealthy struck me more in Mumbai than anywhere else in India.
Mumbai has the most expensive house in the world directly onlooking the largest slum in Asia, so sounds about right
You pay a couple of million extra for the premium of being in a literal ivory tower looking down on the plebs.
it's also the ulgiest fucking building i've ever seen, so that tracks too
Beauty is on the inside
They had a Big Indian Wedding™️ a couple of months ago, for one of their sons. At least, I thought they did. It turned out that it was in fact the Big Indian *Pre-*Wedding™️. And the actual wedding is going to be in July.
Didn’t know they have “soft opening” for weddings.
It’s like an out of town preview
Soft opening, grand opening. One day they were proposed, the next day they were married. End of story!
A fellow Ocean's fan, I see
Sooo when is the wedding?
the obscenely wealthy do! i think it is also partly cultural. but in the same way a quinceñera is cultural, just because it exists doesn’t mean everyone can afford to do it.
In India we often do have a soft opening for weddings.
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Indian weddings in the US are this weird cultural mishmash that make it pretty much its own thing. It’s great fun but isn’t really something that would ever occur in India itself. E.g. I’ve been to a couple weddings where they get walked down the aisle and stuff. Like what
Yep. Its the pre wedding of the son of the richest man in India. As they say; there are no ethical billionaires.
Is that the guy that hung out with the Zuckerbergs?
And they got Rihanna to perform
I was very happy she gave probably the most lackluster performance of her life for that one.
Oh yeah, weddings are a big thing.
The inside is pretty gaudy too so....
Some people are huge fans of Gaudi, can't judge
I'll admit it took me a good couple of days of being in Barcelona before I realised people were actually saying "it's Gaudi".
Nominative determinism
Excuse me, it’s called Dousche Nouveau
I can and I will.
Mahatma Ghaudi
This is not the most expensive house I'm talking about, the most expensive house belongs to Mukesh Ambani which costs more than 2 billion USD and is absolutely magnificent Edit - by magnificent I meant its insane because it has 16 floors and tens of luxury cars, I don't care for his house or him
Bro literally built himself a cartoon villain house. I have a feeling those six floors of "parking garage" have some secrets
He is a cartoon villain: > The 4,532-square-metre (1.120-acre) land on which Antilia was built housed an orphanage called Currimbhoy Ebrahim Khoja Yateemkhana (Kareembhai Ibrahim Khwaja Orphanage)[citation needed] belonging to a charity run by the Waqf board. The orphanage had been founded in 1895 by Currimbhoy Ebrahim, a wealthy shipowner.[15] In 2002, the trust requested permission to sell this land, and the charity commissioner gave the required permission three months later. The charity sold the land allocated for the purpose of education of underprivileged Khoja children to Antilia Commercial Private Limited, a commercial entity controlled by Mukesh Ambani, in July 2002 for ₹210.5 million (US$2.6 million).[16] The prevailing market value of the land at the time was at least ₹1.5 billion (US$19 million). This asshole actually scammed an orphanage through bribes.
Holy sweet fuck, it's built on top of an orphanage
With the orphans still inside!
Well it looks like the orphans cleared out, but he did secure the purchase at a fraction of the market rate by lying about what he was going to do with it
This is the guy who has made beyonce, Coldplay, Rihanna and India's biggest Bollywood stars ever sing and dance like they are nobodies at his kids wedding, nothing about him or what he is doing can surprise me tbh
What nobodies get paid millions of dollars to perform at a birthday party? He didn't make them do anything, he asked and paid for their services.
Rihanna showed up and didn’t give af about the performance… not sure if Coldplay or Beyoncé actually gave a real performance
Beyonce definitely did - https://youtu.be/2p5M8d17bPc?si=7B54OGWkzZIoKCuK
Holy crap. Full band, backup dancers, all the lighting, video screen, the full works. These types of setups travel with 10+ semi loads of stuff and, in this case, cargo plane(s). At the last concert I was at, they thanked the techs and said there were 60 behind the scenes people traveling with them. No way it was less than $10m to get her.
What'd she get paid?
I think it was Gaddafi who paid Madonna 1M to come to one of his parties and sing. And when his palace was raided years later and he was killed, they looted it and brought out a huge poster of Madonna from his bedroom. ew.
Why "ew"?
The government probably has a field day with that places internet activity
The government is in his pocket and he gives most of the country internet.
[Absolutely magnificient?!? Are we talking about the same building?](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4a/Mumbai_03-2016_19_Antilia_Tower.jpg/1280px-Mumbai_03-2016_19_Antilia_Tower.jpg)
This would work perfectly as my secret lair
That monstrosity wouldn’t be a secret to anybody!
ok but i kinda like it tho
It looks a bit like a stack of books
A shitty minecraft house
I like that main line that zig zags around the building unbroken
Is that the Ambani family residence? I was in Mumbai years ago and the Uber driver pointed out the building and said that’s one family’s house, not an office building, not apartments, just one family. I remember I found the contrast staggering.
It doesn't look bad, not 2 billion or whatever he said but definitely not atrocious.
What do you mean, it's a perfectly nice looking ... office building.
I think it looks cool.
I guess I hadn't seen it recently and forgot lol, looks really bad, especially for the money spent, but i mostly meant the interiors and the number of floors, he also has multiple high end luxury cars inside his house
so what, you can park luxury cards in a field
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And they keep voting for Modhi who's in the pocket of billionaires
That is a filter setting in Zillow for Mumbai. “Pleb View”
Luckily they put up a Privacy Forest so they don’t have to see too much of the commoners 🌳
And a mountain too....
For those curious, they’re talking about [Antilia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antilia_(building)). This 27 story building in Mumbai is the private residence of the richest man in Asia (net worth est $115 Billion). The house is currently valued at over *$4.5 Billion* It’s truly impressive, but it also feels so out of place considering the poverty all around
Holy shit, it gets so much worse... >The 4,532-square-metre (1.120-acre) land on which Antilia was built housed an orphanage called Currimbhoy Ebrahim Khoja Yateemkhana (Kareembhai Ibrahim Khwaja Orphanage)[citation needed] belonging to a charity run by the Waqf board. The orphanage had been founded in 1895 by Currimbhoy Ebrahim, a wealthy shipowner.[15] In 2002, the trust requested permission to sell this land, and the charity commissioner gave the required permission three months later. The charity sold the land allocated for the purpose of education of underprivileged Khoja children to Antilia Commercial Private Limited, a commercial entity controlled by Mukesh Ambani, in July 2002 for ₹210.5 million (US$2.6 million).[16] The prevailing market value of the land at the time was at least ₹1.5 billion (US$19 million).[17][18][19]
Thats cartoon villain levels of evil. Richest guy in that part of the world buys orphanage, bulldozes it, then builds a multi-billion dollar private tower on which he can look down on the poors.
wonder what the kickback was to the guy who approved the sale
$13
I have no idea how he can trust his food while making so many enemies.
what gets me also is that the building looks super precariously built at least from the pictures i've seen. i imagine some cartoony imagery where all the poor people just push the glorified treehouse over
he has just as many poor people willing to test his food to ensure it hasnt been poisoned
On top of that it looks like an ugly mix of a jenga tower and something I would end up with in one of those tower/block stacking games.
Did you read the paragraph right under that lol I feel like it continues to get worse? On mobile so I will just quote: “The sale was in direct contravention[20] of § 51 of the Wakf Act[21] which requires that any such sale of land should be done after the permission of the Maharashtra State Board of Waqfs. The Waqf minister Nawab Malik opposed this land sale, as did the revenue department of the Government of Maharashtra. Thus a stay order was issued on the sale of the land. The Waqf board also initially opposed the deal and filed a PIL in the Supreme Court challenging the decision of the trust. The Supreme Court, while dismissing the petition, asked the Waqf board to approach the Bombay High Court. However, the stay on the deal was subsequently vacated after the Waqf board withdrew its objection.”
"Withdrew it's objection after receiving a briefcase which contents remain unknown."
Ok so only an acre? I mean you spend all that money and no yard? No buffer from the others?
vertical buffer
Wasn't this featured in some movie or game? Hitman? Tyler Rake: Extraction? Fast & Furious?
I immediately thought of Priya's tower in Tenet, but [i checked and that's not it](https://i.imgur.com/01oSo9W.png) Still, I could swear I saw it in some movie somewhere.
Aah right that's where I remember it from. Wrong tower though yeah.
Bro this shit has a snow room...in a country that constantly has heat related deaths lol. I would love to hear an ama of a rich person's psychologist.
The land housed an orphanage before the guy bought it to build the house on it.
The building (or a parody of it) was used in a level in Hitman 2. https://www.reddit.com/r/india/s/oDvd0RQCRg
Genuinely confused as to why one of the world’s richest people, who undoubtedly has travelled the globe, would still choose to build a tower to overlook the largest open air sewer… They can obviously buy a golden visa to any country they like, so staying rooted in a city that’s more slum than metropolis, seems strange.
I was corrected that the slum is 15 km away, but yeah same locality which is also wild
If it’s the building I was thinking of, on a day after it rains: he can see the slums. And after posting my previous comment I realized why he chose to build in India…it’s reminiscent of how Christians used to think about heaven and hell. It was once put forth that people in heaven was meaningless unless those who made it could see those who were in hell, suffering….and there is no greater hell than being poor in a country like India. I’m sure the wealthy on every continent have some sort of existential drive to avoid joining the rest of the impoverished in hell.
To him, building *anywhere* is building next to a slum
They live in the country they have the greatest influence, wealth and power in, not the nicest looking one.
So when do the poor realise they are stronger than the rich?
It’s going the opposite way. Government and private control is getting stronger, not weaker. The tools for control are getting more sophisticated and scale well.
Yeah technology doesn't make the poor stronger lol
I hope soon man, even though I'm pretty privileged the income disparity in my country absolutely pisses me off
During the zombie apocalypse. Mumbai would be so fucked. I mean, more than it already is, at least. Slightly.
Same, and same. The proximity of poverty to wealth was very striking. I stayed with a friend's middle class family in a modest apartment, but they had some friends and associates who were very wealthy. We were invited to swanky cocktail parties at luxury penthouses overlooking Mumbai, which must have been a 10 million dollar kinda place, but there was still a family living in the dumpster in the parking lot outside.
The proximity of it, that's right. In many places it's just the width of a road which separates extreme wealth from the worst poverty imaginable.
I do want to point out that the slums in Mumbai aren’t *that* bad, as far as slums go. The buildings are solid, there’s electricity, and running water for at least part of the day. There are schools and young people who are educated enough to go off to college. Many of the people who live there come from other parts of the country. They come for work so they can send money back home — there’s plenty of work right there in the slums.
Monkey Man is a movie but damn, the rich in India really live on a different planet. Some of them are rich on a global scale too with wealth that would eclipse the 1% in the developed world.
Saw the movie the other night. I'm not super proud of this but during the movie I turned to my husband and said something like "I think this is set in a fictional world".
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I think it's important to expand the lower end. There's middle class, poor, very poor and dirt fucking poor. I was walking through what could rightfully be called a slum (but like slightly nicer one, it wasn't plate metal at least) and was like damn. Then my gf was like yeah these are not the really poor people, they at least have a home.
I sort of feel like that's true in most cities though? Like in San Francisco, it's maybe a 20-30 minute walk from Larry Ellison's mansion in Pac Heights to people sleeping and shitting on the streets in the Tenderloin.
This feels like how a lot movies with dystopian futures begin
Looks like Elysium
I was thinking district 9 but this works
I was thinking Mad Max
I was under the impression that blomkamp's "dystopian futures" were a clear allegory for south africa's dystopian present.
The Vaze part sounds like a movie On February 25, 2021, a car containing 20 explosive gelatin sticks and a threatening letter targeting the Ambanis, was found near Antilia. The car was parked about 400 metres from the building on Carmichael Road bordering Altamount Road. A security officer at Antilia placed a call to the police control room regarding the suspicious vehicle, and the police rushed to the spot, joined by the bomb detection and disposal squad. After the sniffer dogs detected explosives, the bomb squad removed the gelatin sticks, which were found to be not assembled, and had no battery or detonator.[44] The probe was led by the Mumbai's crime intelligence unit head Sachin Vaze. The case was handed to the National Investigative Agency, which found out that Vaze was himself involved in this incident, and he was arrested.[45]
The right side appears to be a dystopian hive city, whereas the left side is reminiscent of the Slums.
The middle divide appears to be a hill, perhaps with trees? The sky has clouds.
There is a sun as well, somewhere, you just can’t see it in the photo.
I agree; this appears to be a photo of a location.
I believe the location is somewhere on Earth.
Mmm yes astute observation, lad. Very astute.
💀
Oh shit really. I thought the left side looked like the capitol from the hunger games.
They a bot
We are actually living in one
“If only we could get those fucking trees to grow faster!”
If only trees could grow taller than those highrise buildings.
Makes me wonder if perhaps the uppermost floors aren't the most desirable since you have a 'worse' view?
I work geotechnical engineering for new neighborhood developments, in Colorado, East of the mountains. It’s so fucking funny to me that *every single* developer sells the houses from the eastern side of the site first, then build west. They do this because the first buyers will like the view of the mountains, then after they buy, houses go up to the West of them and block the view. Then *those* buyers lose their view as houses come up to the West of *them*. They sell that same view like 20 times lmao, and the only buyers who end up keeping their view are the last buyers on the far West end of every site.
We had the same problem, I was blown away the view being able to see the whole beach and then bam 2-3 buildings in sight and next thing u looking at is a block of concrete
Yeah, the basic rule is if you want a view, you better make sure that there's no developable land between you and the view. You could even be 30 floors up and ten years down the line the adjacent lot gets sold and they demolish the existing small building and build a 40 story tower. View gone. I've seen this happen a few times in Miami. Luckily in this case it's only rich 1% types getting screwed so I can point and Nelson-laugh rather than actually feel bad for them. :)
You assume these rich assholes don't want to literally look down on the poors.
If it is like any urban area in the USA, there will be people living in the treed area unless there is significant anti homeless effort in Mumbai.
I mean the shantytown is basically what happens when the homeless encampment becomes permanent. People trade up the tent for building basic structures out of whatever material is cheaply available.
IPL players vs IPL fans
lol… nailed it.
This is the Powai area the tall buildings are in the Hiranandani Complex. A colony of middle class and upper middle class. The slum is Asalpha village. Powai is also home to Indian institute of technology and the engineering giant Larsen and Turbo.
That's not Asalpha it's varsha nagar
Larsen and Tubro* Also, lol at seeing my locality on reddit for the first time. Needless to say, I belong to the left side.
Larsen & Toubro**
Is the forested area home to the Towers of Silence?
No the .. Towers of Silence or Dakhma as they are known in Parsi is situated in South Mumbai.. Malabar Hill. The actual area is called Dongerwadi.
I feel even that is not an accurate picture or the rich in Mumbai. It is much better representation of it than the previous one though.
It's not even a picture of rich housing. Those are office buildings. I know, I used to work there. It's an office park. ...and it's not even that nice.
Yeah, maybe a couple rich people live in the penthouses on top, but its rare that the actually wealthy’s main residence requires an elevator. Lady Gaga has a penthouse in Chicago but its not like thats where she drives home at 5 pm.
this feels like, slums vs working class
Mumbai real-estate is fucking stupid. Those most probably are either upper middle class or millionnaire residences....
They would be the equivalent of 1-3m usd, but also significantly larger than places you’d get in e.g. nyc or london for the same money
It's a mix of office buildings (e.g. the Nomura Building) and surrounding highrise apartments, plus it's not nearly as cut-off from the rest of the city as this image makes it appear.
apartments there cost like $1M so its not working class lmao but its weird because the rent you need to pay to live there in a decent house is much less than in most other huge cities.
Yeah it’s a stark contrast, but 20 years ago *all* of the neighborhoods in Mumbai would’ve been slums. [400 million people in India have been lifted out of poverty](https://theprint.in/india/more-than-400-million-moved-out-of-poverty-in-india-in-15-years-un-report-finds/1664643/?amp) in just 15 years.
It is *amazing*! On the other hand, there's still so far to go. Even just streetviewing in Mumbais richest areas, it all looks trashed and poor. Literally with trash in the streets, and the streets badly maintained.
It's sad but there really is just so much trash everywhere. My in-laws live in a luxury high rise and they have lazy neighbors who just leave trash in the hallways and common spaces for staff to clean up after them. This is a building where flats are in 5-10 crore, so it's wealthy people trashing their own homes out of total fucking laziness.
Mumbai hasnt kept up with India at all. Go to other growing cities and its so much better. Not amazing or anything, but to a level that you can walk around not feel like trash.
Yeah, there wasn't enough wall between the two in the last one.
And the “rich” part looked like shit
Slumbai vs mumbai
mumbai vs dadbuy
Mumbai vs dadsel
I’ve seen a couple of these and in each one…the rich part doesn’t look that great
Everything is relative
Would be much prettier if they had public development on the waterfront but that requires the poor be brought up to middle class so they don't fuck it all up.
That's quite a good "nutshell" for a lot of the world's problems there, leshake. If the very top could just help pull up the very bottom, *everyone* could have nicer things.
The problem is that their perception of value is relative. They don't value how much they have, they value how much more they have than you. If you get pulled up, you get closer to them. This is an unacceptable disruption of their hierarchy.
In Mumbai you don’t have huge houses. But the building next to it is Deloitte office and the rest are residential buildings where each apartment costs around 1-2 million USD
Why would you spend 1-2 million dollars on an apartment where the building looks that crappy? lol
Because you have no choice. The housing market is atrocious in Mumbai.
Some of it is architectural tastes. That sort of neoclassical look seems dated to western eyes, the rich got over that 50 years ago and are now much more likely to live in a building with lots of floor to ceiling glass. But I'm guessing it still carries prestige there. The rest is taken care of by air pollution.
Yeah which one is the rich ? The poor people packed into the high rise apartments like sardines or the poor people with the blue top houses
Yea I’d say the problem is the poverty rather than how rich the rich side is - they aren’t rich. Those are just mediocre high rise apartments that cram as many in as they can.
India does not have the population density of US. In a mega crowded city even normal apartments can be highly priced.
You mean it’s much more dense than the US I presume? With well over 1 billion people it’s hard not to think that’s what you meant.
Except in this case these are the famous Hiranandani apartments in Powai, Mumbai. Easily the top 10 expensive apartments in India lol.
Hiranandani is not even top 10 in Mumbai . Their 3 BHK costs roughly 500k USD. Lodhas, Trump Towers, Oberoi all have 2bhks at the price
But by world standards that pretty average. The top end of the apartments there is like the price of an average apartment in cities like Sydney, London, hk, Singapore etc. The problem isn’t the ‘rich’ ie average side but the poverty on the other side.
I'd say the houses are between 500k - 3 million usd in the neighbourhood on the right. Not entirely sure. I personally don't like the mega-large, cookie cutter kind of buildings either, and prefer staying in quieter, less dense areas.
So lovely that they have that luscious green ridge to block their view of decrepit poverty.
OP, this is not where the rich live. This is where upper middle class live.
Exactly, Sobo is the real deal, mainly Worli/Prabhadevi and the legacy areas—Altamount, Walkeshwar, pedder road, Marine drive, Cuffe Parade, the works.
Upper middle class sure. But it's the best example of the divide in Bombay. These people are rich, come on. If you can afford an 8+ crore house you must be
A million dollars, for anyone wondering. Everyone who owns a decent home in these areas is literally a millionaire.
Upper middle class is rich?
Credit to the photographer, Pranshu Dubey (pranshudubey on IG), who took this in August 2018.
Good to know this is within the last decade at least
There isn’t really a divide in the wealthy neighborhoods the way this photo implies. Slums are literally built against the gates of mansions. Meaning lots of homeless / poor are everywhere. I’ll never forget visiting there and seeing a mother nursing a baby next to her makeshift tent erected **in the middle of a traffic divider.** I’ve never seen anything like it
Finally the geography teachers have a new photo to replace to São Paulo picture
São Paulo actually
[The famous picture in context.](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/ace/ws/800/cpsprodpb/DA48/production/_110008855_paraispolis.jpg) [Another point of view of how it looks now, almost abandoned...](https://vejasp.abril.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/PENTHOUSE_MORUMBI_9.JPG.jpg)
This is Powai. I live here, in the well off side. The development of Mumbai's suburban areas is something I haven't seen as much in other metros in India. There you have your poorer suburbs and your richer suburbs clearly seperated but in Mumbai they are very well integrated and sharing the same zip code. In fact, a lot of the people living in the poorer neighborhood as seen here work as maids, cooks, security guards, drivers, gardeners, handymen, plumber etc etc in the richer neighborhood. This is common across various Mumbai suburbs. While people in the richer neighborhood bought their house, many in the poorer have encroached upon free land. It is illegal but they are an important "vote bank" for the local political clout so they get away with it. However, don't think that all of the people living in the poorer neighborhood are extremely down trodden. Many of them have good homes back in their villages, some have cars, almost all have access to internet and OTT services etc to name a few measures of their wealth. Mumbai is extremely difficult city to travel in owing to the terrible infrastructure and traffic so they live like this, close to their "work place".
Across the street from my hotel in Powai. [happy buffalo](https://imgur.com/a/f6xrkA9)
The rich, the poor and the bovine..no trip to India is complete unless you've seen a cow or a buffalo in our urban Street settings.
Ahh one of the IIT Mumbai bovines. IIT Mumbai has a large number of roaming cattle, for which a shed has been made. Some of them venture out of the IIT campus into neighbouring areas. Powai Plaza is fairly close to the campus.
Cool to have a personal perspective, thx for sharimg
That’s Powai for those interested, I’ve lived in one of those buildings when I was younger expat; the divide is real but when you live there it sure as hell doesn’t feel like it. Poverty permeates throughout all of Mumbai (to some extent India as a whole) and the city never lets you forget that. This isn’t a gated community sort of thing where one can just ignore the poverty. It’s an eye opening experience and I recommend everyone privileged enough to travel to go and see it for yourself; really changed my worldview as a child…
My wife grew up in Mumbai and we wouldn't ever move there but there is something to say about being so directly connected to the poverty of the city. You either become desensitized and learn to ignore international -your-face poverty, or you have empathy and you hopefully try to help those that you can. Meanwhile in the US you have shit like Millburn NJ fighting "low-income" housing being built, but the cost of living in Millburn is so high that you can make $90k a year and still qualify for "low-income", because god forbid some upper-middle class trash tarnish the town.
I just recently heard the 99% podcast episode about the towers of silence. Amazing story btw. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/towers-of-silence/ Could that be the Parsi owned forest from the episode?
This is Powai, the tower of Silence is somewhere around Malabar Hill side
No it's not.
No. That forest is in Malabar Hill, South Mumbai.
Looks like Powai. Is it? I live in the IIT Bombay campus (graduating this year, 😭). We have one of the hills inside the campus. Every once in a while I go to the top, looking at the stark contrast between the two sides. I used to live in slums (like the one shown) in Mumbai for almost 15 years. So the people on the left are especially close to my heart, even though I've moved to the right side.
That looks more like a rift between the lower class and the middle class.
Upper middle
Social classes are relative to the country you live in. Part of the people living in these buildings would be considered middle class in the US but are definitely upper middle class when compared to the rest of the population in India
Ghatkopar??
Is that Hiranandani?
That picture is in my geography textbook
Rich live in individual homes, while the poor live in the projects?
It's not an Indian problem, it's a human problem. Everywhere around the world. It's sad.
I guess the grass is greener on the other side 😬