Word: samant
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...streets are wet with the dew of the coming monsoon as Rajeev Samant unveils his latest enterprise in midtown Bombay. The Tasting Room is a softly lit tapas bar built into a high-end furniture store in the old textile district. The idea is to showcase Samant's range of Indian wines in a space that oozes class and cash--with bottles costing twice the average Indian weekly wage, it's meant to be exclusive. Tonight the guests include local investment bankers, venture capitalists and a group of students from the business school in Fontainebleau, France, on a two-week...
...mishandling of the crisis. "We realized no one was going to descend from the heavens to solve our problems, and we were going to have to do it ourselves." The same is true of Bombay's economy. "On the face of it, the city's screwed," says wine impresario Samant. "Look at the traffic, the bureaucracy, the sewage, so much poverty next to so much money. You'd think the place would erupt." Yet look at how nimbly the city negotiates those obstacles, he says. "There's no better place to be in business right...
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...
India's great hope runs on hope itself. Hope is the reason Gupta stays in Bombay, despite falling ill from diesel fumes each time she crosses the city. Samant says it's why, unlike in New Orleans, the people didn't disintegrate with their city after the floods. Hope brought Bombay together and keeps it together. "Look at Dharavi," he says of the city's notorious slum, the biggest in Asia. "The place has a GDP of $1 billion a year. Dharavi makes you realize everyone has a stake in keeping Bombay going." One day all those millions of expectations...
Most art brut bears a primordial stamp, but Samant's is sophisticated; his indecipherable scribbles speak to man deeper than the syntax of known language. To Samant, they tell of his own introspection: "It is as if I have walls around me." Yet he speaks to the world through their painterly surfaces, and centuries echo musically off them...