The large glass window in his mahogany office on the fourth floor of Wadia International Centre in Worli captures the transition that is underway in this part of Mumbai. The window frames a stack of buildings: some dilapidated, others dizzyingly altitudinous. It is with this as a background that JehWadia, the 40-year-old Bombay Dyeing honcho, speaks animatedly, with an almost schoolboy enthusiasm, about why Central Mumbai, the ground zero for his group company Bombay Realty, is poised to acquire a new identity on the city's real estate radar, why the term "slow" should be shorn of its negative connotation when applied to the growth of his low-cost airline GoAir, and why "greed" is an ugly word for the scion of the 275-year-old business family.
The pet project of Jeh — who wears three hats as the MD of Bombay Dyeing, Bombay Realty and GoAir — is the group's one-year-old real estate company, Bombay Realty. The Wadias own 70 acres of land between Dadar and Worli — inherited from forefathers — and have now decided to develop it as a mixed land use project. "One can walk to office, walk to shop, walk to a restaurant," says Jeh, adding that it solves the biggest problem of Mumbai's traffic.
16/02/13 Manju V & Shubham Mukherjee/Times of India
