A group of men is watching the latest news on the billboard outside the Bombay Stock Exchange - the oldest stock exchange in Asia. The city's stock exchange accounts for 92% of the country's total share turnover. India's main stock index, the Sensex, has tripled in the past three years.
Home to 19 million people, Bombay, is projected by 2015 to be the planet's second most populous metropolis, after Tokyo. But it's already a world of its own with Bollywood stars, 24-hour traffic jams, sprawling slums and Manhattan-priced high rises.
The booming middle class takes a Sunday stroll on Juhu Beach in the upscale Bandra-area.
The class divide is starkest in cities like Bombay and Bangalore, where million-dollar apartments overlook million-population slums. UNICEF estimates that there are 11 million street children in India - at least 125,000 children live on the streets of Mumbai.
The urban extremes can be hard to take in the Indian mega cities. A new golf course has sprung up in downtown Mumbai, while new skyscrapers are being built in the background.
India's booming technology industry has bred a new middle class some 250 million strong. Many are engineers employed by outsourcing firms like Infosys, whose Bangalore headquarters, employs some 19,000 people. At the same time, more than a quarter of India's 1.1 billion people still live in slums.
The upper class relax with white wine in the softly lit tapas bar, Olive, in the old textile district of Bangalore. The booming concentration of business activity breeds a sophisticated, cosmopolitan outlook with fancy restaurants and nightclubs.
Despite the explosion of consumerism and capitalism in India's booming cities, more than half of all Indians still live in rural areas. Globalisation has brought tremendous changes in India and, for some, tremendous rewards.
Forty-five per cent of Indian children under the age of five are malnourished.
To know Bombay is to know modern India. Full of ambitions and an emblem of globalization you can reach out and touch, a giant city where change is pouring in on a daily basis. To migrants from India's poor states, the metropolis is known as Mayanagri, the City of Dreams.
