National Centre for Performing Arts (NCPA), Mumbai

This guide to the National Centre for Performing Arts in Mumbai opens on New Year's Eve 1997, when an electrical fire destroyed the nearly finished Jamshed Bhabha Theatre months before it was due to open. It traces the theatre's namesake, Dr. Jamshed Bhabha, back to 1966, when he first persuaded the Tata family to back a national arts centre and then spent years reclaiming the very plot at Nariman Point from the Arabian Sea. Stand in the foyer and look for the marble staircase, salvaged decades earlier from a demolished Malabar Hill mansion.