INDIA’S ECONOMIC and social disparities will starkly manifest themselves this week when Mumbai businessman Mukesh Ambani, the world’s fourth richest man, moves into what is possibly the world’s most expensive ever private home.
The 1,000-odd guests Ambani plans on inviting to his house-warming party will no doubt find the 27-storey building spacious. Named Antilla after a mythical island in the Atlantic, it has floor space of over 400,000 sq ft, far more than Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles .
Built at a reported cost of $2 billion (€1.4 billion) and located in the heart of the port city where tens of thousands of people sleep on pavements each night, Antilla looks like a glass palace put together hastily by a child with his Lego set. Mr Ambani will live in the house with his wife, his three children and his mother.
In a country where 77 per cent of its population of more than 1.2 billion people lives on less than $2 a day, Antilla boasts of entertainment centres, a ballroom, a health club, an Olympic-size swimming pool and a four-storey open garden, a luxury in the densely populated city of 20 million.
Its designers have kept to the principles of Vaastu, the traditional Hindu system of design based on directional alignments similar to Chinese feng shui, to propagate “positive energy”. The distinctive feature is that no room or floor is alike.
The first six floors are reserved for Mr Ambani’s 168 imported cars alongside an in-house service centre to maintain them. The entertainment centre, comprising a mini-theatre capable of seating 50 people, is on the eighth floor. Other floors have gyms and glass-fronted apartments for guests.
The top four floors are for the Ambani family with a breathtaking view of the Arabian Sea and the city’s impressive skyline. Each family member has their own gym.
Down dual stairways with silver-covered railings is a large ballroom with 80 per cent of its ceiling covered in crystal chandeliers. There is also a stage for entertainers and a kitchen capable of sustaining several hundred guests.
The two floors above the family’s residence have been set aside as maintenance areas and for an “air space floor” capable of accommodating three helicopters.
There has been criticism from many Mumbai residents who find Mr Ambani’s extravagance – he owns the petrochemical giant Reliance Industries – “vulgar” in a city where millions lead pitiful existences in futile search of riches.
In another development that highlights India’s financial inequities, 150 businessmen recently bought a Mercedes Benz each on one day in the small town of Aurangabad, 400km east of Mumbai, in a transaction worth $150 million.“We wanted to put Aurangabad on the world map,” said Rahul Mishrikotkar, one of the buyers.
India is home to 42 per cent of the world’s underweight children below the age of five.