Introduction: Lifespaces

'We used to live right there, man. Now, it's all business. India is at the centre of the world now, bhai. And I . . . I am at the centre . . . of the centre.'

Salim, Slumdog Millionaire

'Please, make yourself at home. I'll be with you in just a minute.'

With a hospitable wave of the hand, the president of Mahindra Lifespaces directs me to a sofa on the far side of his penthouse office.

A dapper gent of India's old school, Mr Nanda is close to retirement. He is wearing an immaculately tailored suit and exudes a refined yet roguish charm.

On the desk in front of him sits an orderly pile of paperwork. He leafs through the pages, signing some with a flourish and pushing others to one side.

A long bank of windows runs along the side of the room. I gaze out at the muddling cityscape of Mumbai, a conglomeration of vertical skyscrapers and horizontal slums. I am surprised to see a flower garden on the rooftop below.

The company president puts down his pen and strides across the room. His steps are long and his leather-soled shoes leave a visible trail in the thick carpet, like the tracks of a small mammal on virgin snow.

He takes a seat in the high-backed armchair opposite me. It is late morning. He has a lunch appointment. What would I like to know?

I explain about a visit I'd made to Mahindra World City a few weeks beforehand. Touted by Mahindra as India's first 'integrated business city', the multi-million-dollar real-estate project is Mr Nanda's brainchild.

The futuristic township lies on a sprawling patch of wasteland outside Chennai (formerly known as Madras), one of a cluster of mega-cities that Indians affectionately refer to as their 'metros'. It took an hour to get there from the airport. A clogged line of commuter traffic crawled slowly into town in the opposite direction. Heading against the flow, we'd sped along.

I had gone at the behest of a business magazine, which had got wind of the project's eco-credentials and asked me to check them out. Through a perfect white smile, a PR girl had used the drive to laud the company's environmental achievements. An earnest delegation of local management then spent the remainder of the day reinforcing the message. Our tour took in the tertiary water-treatment plant and biodegradable waste unit, the rainwater catchment systems and smart-drip irrigation processes. The development's large natural lake and protected forest stood untouched, they'd insisted.

The magazine's editor was impressed. So was I. Not just because of the City's green innovations. Everything about the place, the whole package, struck me as extraordinary. A scale model in the City's visitor centre mapped it all out in miniature. On one side, hundreds of modern duplexes pointed towards a puddle of blue paint depicting the lake. Some are already complete, others still under construction. A circuit-board of private roads connects driveway to driveway. Within the community gates no convenience is overlooked, from the international school and shopping arcade to the restaurant court and leisure centre. All are for residents only. A fence runs around the site's perimeter to ensure outsiders remain just that.

The City is registered as an Export Processing Zone and sets its clock by business hours. Whole neighbourhoods hum to the sound of machinery. Automotive suppliers occupy one entire district. Apparel manufacturers, another. Their factories churn out brake parts and branded underwear for the global market. The brightest and the best of the City's corporate residents live in 'Cybervale', Mahindra's stab at an Indian Silicon Valley. The high-tech enclave houses some of the country's largest information technology firms. Their gargantuan offices of glass and steel rise incongruously from the surrounding scrub.

Mahindra World City is almost as exceptional for what it lacks as for what it contains. The privately owned metropolis boasts no temple or cremation ground, no market stalls or rickshaws. Public commons are absent, replaced by landscaped verges and impossibly green lawns watered by timer-controlled sprinklers. The grass is trimmed by motorised lawnmowers, not grazing cows or goats. Sixth Avenue, the main boulevard, is free of India's usual bustle and flurry. Tropical palms are set at perfect equidistance along its route. It has no footpath. In Mahindra World City, everyone drives, cycles or travels by company bus.

I have visited India on several occasions, the first time as an adventure-hungry school-leaver fifteen years ago. Mahindra World City is different from anything I saw on those previous trips. The scale of its ambition, the breadth of its vision, the size of its budget - all would have been inconceivable a decade ago.

Yet there it is, taking shape in the Tamil countryside. Not a mirage, but a functioning fragment of tomorrow. How could that be? That's what I want to know.

The company president tugs stiffly at the cuffs of his shirt and clears his throat. If I don't mind, he'll start with the big picture. India has over five thousand towns and nearly four hundred cities, he begins. Between them, they accommodate more than three hundred million people, just over a quarter of India's population. The country's urban residents are set to nearly double over the next twenty years.

'Imagine, two hundred and forty million more people. Our cities are already bursting at the seams as it is.'

He pauses to allow me to digest the figures. Roughly four times the population of the UK. The numbers, indeed, are baffling. But then numbers in the world's second most populous country often are.

Next come the demographics. In debonair tones, the real-estate boss tells me of India's 'demographic dividend'. More than half of all Indians are currently under the age of twenty-five. With the youngest working population on the planet, India has the potential to become the world's factory. Get it right and it could become its chief service provider too.

Neither outcome will materialise, he stresses, unless the country sorts out its cities. India's metropolises, not the countryside, will provide the jobs of tomorrow. For that to happen, the existing urban infrastructure must be completely overhauled.

The president checks his watch. He has a couple more minutes. His focus narrows.

Mahindra Lifespaces cannot remodel India's cities alone. What it can do is create 'islands of excellence'. The World City, he hopes, will prove to be exactly that. The Indian-owned property-development firm is already pouring billions of rupees into a second such project outside Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan. Mr Nanda's urban archipelago of next-generation cities is taking shape.

There is one more motivation he'd like to share. Just quickly. It is of a more personal nature. He was sitting at his desk one evening, pointing across his spacious office, when an up-and-coming manager knocked on the door. 'We had some business to wrap up. It was late.' In the paternalistic way of old-style managers, the president had asked after the junior's family. The question brought unexpected tears to the younger man's eyes. He had a newborn daughter, he'd explained. He barely got to see her.

The president believes India's talented youth merit more. A two-hour commute, a tiny flat on the edge of town, a complete lack of family time. Is that the sum of all their efforts, what the citizens of New India have to look forward to? 'This poor kid graduated from a good engineering college. He's got a good MBA. He deserves better.' Which is where Mr Nanda's vision for the World City comes in. Everything under one roof. A place to Work, Live, Learn, Play, as the company's motto puts it.

'Now you will excuse me, I trust. My lunch appointment is calling.'

Returning to India was never going to be easy. Much had changed, me included. No longer was I a carefree singleton with a backpack. This time, I came with a wife and two small children. The country had moved on too. I had read about the enormous transformations of recent years - about the country's software boom, its expanding megalopolises, its nuclear weapons, its soaring stock markets, its millionaire entrepreneurs, its expanding middle class, its global stature. India's economy is booming, the headlines trumpet. Asia's elephant is finally awaking. After years in the economic doldrums, it is slowly but surely making good its potential.

Yet could so much have changed? Changes sufficient to create something as grand, confident and frankly un-Indian as the World City? No, that I hadn't expected. Perhaps in a Gulf state or Southern California, but India? This was the land of choked thoroughfares and magnificent old palaces, of bearded sadhus and bedi-smoking beggars, of rattling trains and clapped-out buses, was it not?

Of course, as images go, mine may be off the mark. After all, my earliest impressions of India started out-of-date: some yellowing photographs of a grandfather who served in the dying days of the Raj; stories of my mother's premature birth in the blood-soaked weeks after Partition. Then little else for years bar bedtime stories of Mowgli and the childhood friendship of a few very anglicised, second-generation émigrés.

Not until late adolescence would my perspective on India be updated. For almost a year, I taught English and travelled. The first activity took me to a monastery outside the Himalayan tea-station of Darjeeling. The second led me all over. With hindsight, both offered only a partial view of the country. My teaching...