MUMBAI: Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani has hosted a lavish “open house” party at his opulent new skyscraper residence believed to be the world's most expensive private home. Some 80 of India's rich and famous attended the festivities Friday night at his just-completed 570-feet tall (174-meter) home, which dominates the skyline above Mumbai's traffic-choked roads, the Times of India reported. Top-selling Indian novelist Shobhaa De, who attended the party, called the building – said by media to be the world's priciest private residence with a price tag of over one billion dollars – “the Taj Mahal of the 21st century”. Ambani, who heads India's largest private company, petrochemical giant Reliance Industries, will need 600 employees to maintain the palatial residence, reports said. In a first-person account for the Times of India, De described gliding down a high-speed elevator to “what has got to be the biggest, glitziest ballroom in India – the Palace of Versailles is a poor cousin”. “It was possible to believe for one mad moment that we were all at Cinderella's ball,” she said, describing groaning buffet tables lining “one of the unending walls”. Ambani, his wife and three children are to live in the 27-story building, which according to reports has six floors of parking, swimming pools and a cinema. It is named after the mythical Atlantic island “Antilia”. One newspaper suggested it epitomized “the swagger and confidence of India's economically buoyant upper echelons”. Ambani, 53, is India's wealthiest man with a 27-billion-dollar fortune, according to Forbes. Anti-poverty campaigners have highlighted the contrast between the opulent pad and the plight of many in Mumbai, where half of an estimated 18 million people live in sprawling, insanitary slums, with sketchy or non-existent electricity and water supplies. – Agence France
