Apart from being rich beyond the merged dreams of Croesus and Midas, those individuals have other things in common. Each is blessed with a magical combination of brains, smarts and drive. The IQ+EQ mix has helped them establish great businesses or impart exponential growth to inherited businesses.
Most also lead lives of boring rectitude. At the least, they maintain boring public personas. Indian billionaires are, individually and collectively, devoted to their respective spouses and families. Many are vegetarian teetotallers, with strong religious-spiritual convictions.
Shockingly high energy levels and 16-18 hour days are routine. Quality time is spent chilling out with family and close friends. They are careful with money; many travel economy class and quite a few self-drive middle-aged, mid-range cars.
You will not find them featured in technicolour on Page 3 attending Bollywood Muhurrat parties. Nor will you see them flitting through the dance bars of Mumbai (with or without spouses in tow), uttering high-pitched yelps as they spray the bubbly around and dance the good dance.
Most leave conspicuous consumption to the arriviste, who stand many rungs lower on the net-worth ladder. The flamboyant Richard Branson or the formerly flamboyant Vijay Mallya are both very much exceptions to the rule.
If one can generalise from such small samples, billionaires live like the guy-next-door, only a bit more comfortably. If they like their single malts, operatic arias, or ballooning, they indulge in moderation. One or two may have a colourful past or a relationship with a significant other, rather than with a spouse.
But a surprising number do stay inside the Lakshmanrekha of close friends and family. Thomas J Stanley and William D Danko, two academics from the University of Georgia, did a seminal set of studies sampling over 50,000 American millionaires. They turned those into a set of bestselling books.
Interestingly, the authors paid $1 per questionnaire while doing initial research. As many as 50,000 people with median annual incomes of $250,000-plus took the trouble to fill in personal details. And most accepted the money as well!
Their conclusion: the average American millionaire is a boring, low-key guy. He or she has a profile that's similar to the average Indian millionaire, despite the obvious differences in environment and cultures.
Thus, the super-rich everywhere tend to be tight-fisted, frugal, high-energy people committed to family. He or she (and it's overwhelmingly likely to be "he") is perfectly happy to live way below their means.
Most of the seriously rich also make their pile at boring businesses. I suppose any business, no matter how exotic or glamorous, contains its fair share of the mundane.
Hugh Hefner was said to get his fetish gear mass-produced (by a Gujarati businessman who sourced the leather in Kanpur), while Vinod Khosla cut costs using cheap ballpoints. There is one Internet-poker billionaire of Indian origin and one wind-turbine maharaja.
The IT and pharma mavens are great at running boring, if high-tech, businesses with hyper-efficiency and commitment. And, most of the list consists of commodity and old economy people who have grafted their way up by dint of sheer hard work.
The conservative norms of India may have something to do with wealth creation, post-liberalisation. Although the business environment is tough, there are fewer distractions than in the fleshpots of the West and Japan.
It's a pity, however, that so many things are frowned upon, or downright illegal. Erotica and gambling for example are verboten fields. This is odd because labour arbitrage works just as well in those industries as it does in chip-design and transcription.
If the FM allowed Indians to earn the wages of sin and charged them a service tax, he would mop up enough to wipe out the fisc. And, if PC took such a politically incorrect step, he would also make future Forbes lists slightly more entertaining to read.
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