In Christmas 2007, I found a nightclub in London selling the most expensive cocktail in the world. I was reporting a piece on the gulf between the super-rich and the rest of society ­– and here was a liquid metaphor.



Hand the barman at Movida £35,000 and he would mix up a a shot of Louis XII cognac, some Cristal Rose, a few flakes of edible gold leaf and at the bottom of the glass a diamond ring. During both mixing and drinking two security guards would keep watch.

Running around Mumbai for the past few days has sometimes felt like travelling back in time to that credit-crunch Christmas. Not because I think a banking crash is just around the corner, but because of the size of that gulf between those right at the top of this city and everyone else.

On Thursday afternoon, an events organiser for Mumbai’s wealthiest told me stories of children’s birthday parties in which a Bollywood celebrity was hired at huge expense to sing and dance ­– for a group of eight-year-olds. Of crores of rupees (hundreds of thousands of pounds) being spent on wedding dancers alone. She herself would rank among the city’s elite. For her two-year-old’s birthday, a swimming trip and family lunch was planned and yet friends would ask, “Aren’t you doing anything to celebrate?”

As India’s commercial capital, Mumbai has long been home to some of the richest people on the subcontinent. But in all my travels back and forth to India, I’ve noticed across big cities over the past decade or so a much greater willingness by the wealthy to show off. In Mumbai, that has reached extremes. On our first day here, the cabbie showed us Nariman Point, the Hanging Gardens, the Taj and the Gateway of India – then drove us over to Antilia, reportedly the most expensive home in the world. Owned by Mukesh Ambani, it is worth an estimated $1bn, is 27-storeys high and has three helipads.

However extreme, Antilia is hardly anomalous. A half hour away from where I am writing this, a new residential estate is up for sale, offering seaview flats alongside access to private jets and yachts. The black and gold billboards read: For Kings. For Queens. For Royalty.

The bit of this that really reminds me of London before The Fall is the way those enjoying this lifestyle assume that everyone else is getting a bit of it, too. I am thinking here of the property developer who is now in New York for five days’ shopping ­– his second trip there in two months. Just before he left, he told me that he regularly took 10 holidays a year – but then went on to talk about how his cook had also been to South Africa. Except, it turned out, his servant had gone there for work.

In the 90s, as the second great wave of globalisation got under way, policymakers thought they knew who the winners and losers would be. On the debit side were the blue-collar and manufacturing-workers of the west, whose jobs were going to move east. But that was all worth it, we were assured, as long as people in developing countries got richer. But what a visit to Mumbai shows you is the vast inequality in how those riches have been spread around. You see it in the physical infrastructure: all those new flyovers sprouting up around the city to enable the chauffeur driven classes to get about more easily, even while the commuter trains are still bursting; the crowded, chaotic public hospitals that get by while gleaming new private hospitals open up.

Unlike in Britain or America, the middle classes in urban India are still far better off than they were 10-15 years ago. But in Mumbai, you see how they also struggle to pay for their English-medium schools and non-government doctors. I am thinking here of a family I met last night who were adamant that that they were middle class and yet were also open about how much they were struggling to afford even the basics for their children.

At the end of our chat, the party planner began angsting out loud about what kind of society Mumbai was becoming. “At the top, we’re creating a generation of brats. If they have iPads and birthday extravaganzas now, what will they demand when they’re teens? And at the bottom, can you imagine how much resentment they must be carrying?”