Humax TV Tonight: Streets of Gold: Mumbai visits Fashion Week

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22 Jan

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Streets of Gold: Mumbai is on BBC Two and iPlayer tonight at 9pm.

As India looks to the future, a new generation is hoping to become the super-rich of tomorrow. It’s the day before Holi, the Hindu festival that marks the beginning of Mumbai’s scorching summer, a centuries old celebration where the whole of India showers its streets and people in a rainbow of coloured dye. Young entrepreneur, Sudipan Das, plans to hold a ticketed festival for thousands of Mumbai’s young revellers instead of the traditionally free event.

Fashion Week is also underway in Mumbai’s young and fashionable Bandra district, where we meet fashion models and flatmates, Shimona Nath and Chandani Purohit, both in their early twenties and both walking the runway. Shimona is already the face of India’s most established make-up brand, Lakmé, and Chandani is working hard to realise her ambitions of making it as a model and in turn provide a better life for her family.

We meet Yash Bhanage on opening day at Veronica’s café in Bandra. In a city where a chapati and a cup of chai costs just 10p, the younger generation of Bandra think nothing of splashing out 100 times that amount on a flat white and an artisan bagel.

At 15, Maleesha Kharwa, is one of India’s two hundred thousand teenagers in the city. She and her family live in an illegal settlement under constant threat of slum clearances but this does not stop her dreams of becoming a supermodel.

With so many young people and a growing population, one of the biggest megaprojects in the world is planned with a series of motorways under construction across the sea that will connect Mumbai to rural areas in the countryside, like the small town of Alibag. Capitalising on the property boom in the area is Bollywood actor, Ram Kapoor who is on this way to shake hands on a fourth luxury mansion.

While Alibag’s longer residing citizens are not so happy with the changes, some of the younger generation are excited for the opportunity that new development will bring to what was once a rural backwater.