The Billionaire Raj

by James Crabtree

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I first visited Mumbai in 2007, developing an instant fascination for the place that I’ve never since been able to shake. From that very first trip I still owe a debt to Anand Giridharadas, who sat for hours answering questions over coffee in Indigo Deli, before taking me out to my first meal at Trishna, the city’s legendary seafood joint. The same is true of Pablo Jenkins, who let me share his room at the YMCA in Colaba, just a few streets away from the apartment where I would later come to live. Here I should mention Suketu Mehta too, who I have never actually met, but whose book Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, which a friend suggested I read during that early visit, did as much as anything to excite my interest in the metropolis that would become my home five years later.

  Back in London, when I joined the Financial Times in 2010, my wife and I would often sit around our kitchen table pondering possible future postings as a foreign correspondent. The idea of moving to Mumbai excited me most of all, and it was perhaps a kind of fate that a job in the bureau there came free barely a year after I’d joined the paper. In the years since I have come to owe many debts to my colleagues and friends at the FT, but my thanks are due in particular to its editor, Lionel Barber, who took a sizable gamble sending me off to cover business and finance in a city I barely knew, while gracefully in the process ignoring my lack of experience as a corporate reporter. I’m grateful also to Alec Russell, for encouraging me to go; to James Lamont and Victor Mallet, for being welcoming when I arrived; and later to Ed Luce, for suggesting that my thoughts on the place might in time make something longer than a newspaper article.

  Having turned up in India in 2011, I was lucky enough to share the FT’s ramshackle bureau—up four flights of wooden stairs and above a sari shop—with an array of wonderful colleagues, including Avantika Chilkoti, David Keohane, James Fontanella-Khan, Neil Munshi, Mahinda Gupta, Kanupriya Kapoor, Andrea Rodrigues, and Darshan Salvi. Later, I was equally grateful to the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, who provided me a berth while I wrote my manuscript, and then a more permanent home when it was finished—in particular to Kishore Mahbubani, Danny Quah, and Kanti Bajpai.

  A book of this sort involves many intellectual debts, and my living-room shelves are packed with books by authors whose ideas have shaped my own in ways small and large. On the latter front I owe a particular appreciation to Jayant Sinha and Ashutosh Varshney, whose original article on the idea of an Indian Gilded Age first got me thinking about the power of the country’s super-rich, even before I had arrived in their country. Many others have since debated variants of that same topic, and over the years I have taken inspiration from the writing of Rana Dasgupta, Siddhartha Deb, Patrick Foulis, De
vesh Kapur, Sunil Khilnani, T. N. Ninan, and Michael Walton.

  Writing a book is a distressingly solitary task, but preparing to write one remains mercifully sociable. This is fortunate, given India is a bewildering place, and one whose many and ever-changing intricacies often leave a perpetual sense of uncertainty. To the extent that I ever overcame this feeling, it was because of the generosity of friends, who let me pester them on the issues about which I remained confused.

  In particular, my understanding has been helped immeasurably by conversations with Reuben Abraham, Swaminathan Aiyar, Mukulika Banerjee, Jagdish Bhagwati, Sanjay Bhandarkar, Surjit Bhalla, Sidharth Bhatia, Katherine Boo, Praveen Chakravarty, Sajjid Chinoy, Gurcharan Das, Gaurav Dalmia, Gerson da Cunha, William Dalrymple, Ridham Desai, Sadanand Dhume, Amitabh Dubey, Naresh Fernandes, Anant Goenka, Harsh Goenka, Anthony Good, Ramachandra Guha, Nisid Hajari, Ishaat Hussain, Kumar Iyer, Zahir Janmohamed, Akash Kapur, Bharat Kewalramani, Jaideep Khanna, Parag Khanna, Mukul Kesavan, Manjeet Kripalani, Rajiv Lall, Brijesh Mehra, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Saurabh Mukherjea, Anant Nath, PJ Nayak, Sanjay Nayar, Nandan Nilekani, Nitin Pai, Anuvab Pal, Deepanjana Pal, Jay Panda, Nick Paulson-Ellis, Basharat Peer, Stanley Pignal, Eswar Prasad, Naman Pugalia, Vinod Rai, Raghuram Rajan, Adam Roberts, Alan Rosling, Vijay Sankar, Amartya Sen, Neelanjan Sircar, Ruchir Sharma, Arun Shourie, Arvind Subramanian, Shashi Tharoor, Mark Tully, Siddharth Varadarajan, Gilles Vernier, and Adil Zainulbhai.

  Reading drafts is probably the greatest burden an author can place upon their friends, yet many of mine still gave generously and uncomplaining of their time, skimming chapters and giving kindly feedback on messy early drafts. In particular, I am indebted to Sebastian Abbot, Sara Abdo, Bilal Baloch, Rahul Bhatia, Anirudha Dutta, Henry Foy, Barney Jopson, Raghu Karnad, Madhav Khosla, Neelkanth Mishra, Supriya Nayer, Gautam Pemmaraju, Sanjeev Prasad, Niranjan Rajadhyaksha, Jonathan Shainin, Mihir Sharma, and Milan Vaishnav.

  Elsewhere I owe thanks to a handful of other friends who helped me out in one way or another during my research, especially Sriparna Ghosh, Mahesh Langa, Will Perrin, Fran Sainsbury, Catherine Casey, Raman Nanda, Holly Edgar, and Kiran Stacey. Extra special gratitude is due to my tireless researcher, Mariyam Haider, who conscientiously checked references, dug out facts, fiddled with endnotes, and told me nicely when the story was in danger of getting dull.