The Mumbai-London Business Bridge is the Mumbai leg of My Most Trusted, hosted by Burhanuddin Patanwala. A warm introduction is the only way to meet someone here. No bots, no spam, no cold outreach.
the dabbawalas. Mumbai's lunchbox carriers. Every working day they collect home cooked lunches from kitchens across the city and deliver each one to the right desk, passing it from hand to hand along the way.
Mumbai's dabbawalas have carried lunches across the city for more than a century, and a tin almost never goes to the wrong desk. There is no app behind it. Each tin passes through several pairs of hands, and each person knows the stretch of the route before and after their own. That is how an introduction should travel too: from one person who knows you to the next person who knows them, until it arrives where it was meant to go.
Every club has an idea like this one, and it belongs to the place rather than to us. It is not a slogan we handed out.
Burhanuddin Patanwala holds the Mumbai end of the Bridge. He is a law graduate with a BBA LLB, the Indian five year business and law degree and the equivalent of a JD, and works as an associate at Fortitude Law Associates, which is affiliated with Kelley Drye & Warren LLP. He is building his circle the way this network asks everyone to, one person he can vouch for at a time. He meets people on Zoom, and in person around Mumbai and Navi Mumbai. Nothing he says as a host of this Bridge is legal advice, and introductions made here are introductions, not instructions to act for anyone.
Burhanuddin Patanwala is a real person in Mumbai, not a logo. That is the point. Somebody has to know both people for an introduction to be worth anything.