The article below is from the NY Times.It is very obviously a foreigner’s view of exotic India.But there is some interesting stuff here from which we can draw our own conclusions and perhaps use as we see fit.Read it.Have fun.And do use it.
Indian to the Core, and an Oligarch
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man, with his daughter, Isha, at a cricket match of the Mumbai Indians, which he owns. His company, Reliance Industries, is shaping many facets of his nation’s life.
A minor bureaucrat stood a few rows back, strategizing with aides about how to buttonhole “the Chairman,” as Mr. Ambani is sometimes called. Waiters in baggy tuxedoes took turns trying to offer him a snack, but as they drew near became too nervous to speak.
In the last century, Mohandas K. Gandhi was India’s most famous and powerful private citizen. Today, Mr. Ambani is widely regarded as playing that role, though in a very different way. Like Mr. Gandhi, Mr. Ambani belongs to a merchant caste known as the modh banias, is a vegetarian and a teetotaler and is a revolutionary thinker with bold ideas for what India ought to become.
Yet Mr. Gandhi was a scrawny ascetic, a champion of the village, a skeptic of modernity and a man focused on spiritual purity. Mr. Ambani is a fleshy oligarch, a champion of the city, a burier of the past and a man who deftly — and, some critics say, ruthlessly — wields financial power. He is the richest person in India, with a fortune estimated in the tens of billions of dollars, and many people here expect that he will be the richest person on earth before long. Read more of this post