WHO’S SARI NOW? Nita Ambani, who describes herself as “quite spiritual,” performs one hour of Bharatanatyam, a form of Indian classical dance, each day., PRODUCED ON LOCATION BY GITA & ASSOCIATES.
The wife of India’s richest man, Nita Ambani has built a model township, an elite school, and a Premier League cricket team. But all anyone wants to talk about is her house: the 27-story, 570-foot-tall, 400,000-square-foot Xanadu that few have entered but that has all Mumbai buzzing. Discussing her home for the first time, Nita Ambani talks with James Reginato.
The ice-cube-size diamond ring she is wearing today might suggest otherwise, but it’s not unusual to find Nita Ambani in the trenches. In the past years she has built a series of enterprises that are proud success stories in contemporary India, including an international preparatory school, a Premier League cricket team, the nation’s first Braille newspaper in Hindi, and a 400-acre model township that houses 12,000 people and stands adjacent to the world’s largest oil refinery. A 400-bed hospital wing is under construction and plans are proceeding for a world-class university on 1,000 acres of property.
While it is true that all of these undertakings are owned or financed by her husband, Mukesh, the richest person in India and the 19th-richest in the world, Nita has earned respect in her own right throughout the country for her vision, drive, and willingness to get her jeweled and manicured fingers dirty. Lately, she has been referred to as “corporate India’s first lady.”
So it must be a source of frustration that, notwithstanding her accomplishments, the international press remains fixated upon her house.
Yes, that house: Antilia, the recently erected 27-story, 400,000-square-foot Xanadu in Mumbai that she shares with her three children and Mukesh, 54, who is worth $22.3 billion. (After a surge in the Indian stock market in 2007, he was briefly thought to be the world’s richest man.)
Between the time construction commenced, in 2008, and when it was completed, in late 2010, press coverage of the dwelling grew ever more fantastical and rabid. Does it really have its own air-traffic-control system and three heliports? Can it create its own weather? The intrigue peaked last October when The New York Times ran a prominent piece reporting that the family had yet to move in, perhaps due to glitches with respect to Vastu Shastra, the Hindu philosophy that guides directional alignments in architecture to create spiritual harmony. As they have from the beginning, the Ambanis provided no comment. “It’s a private home. There is no reason to discuss it in public,” responded a spokesman for Reliance Industries, Mukesh’s conglomerate and India’s largest private-sector company. The closed-door policy has only piqued the worldwide fascination that has surrounded the edifice.
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