Free India by Patrick French

our business. You can change a whole family if the children get educated. We want to open many more schools like this, at primary and secondary level.” 4
    Although he did not express it in this way, I felt Sunil Mittal was saying that when you have made a certain amount of money—say $1bn, for the sake of argument—then trying to change the world through philanthropy becomes an attractive way to spend the cash, more interesting than buying another aeroplane, house or company. In his case, the Bharti Foundation was overseen by someone he trusted and who shared his social vision—his older brother, Rakesh Mittal, himself a successful businessman. The annual cost of the schools was 28 crores, a little over $6m. The possibilities for his foundation to effect social change in India—with its comparatively low employment and infrastructure costs—were exceptional. Sunil Mittal had said recently in a television interview that he was inspired by the stories of American tycoons like Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. “I sit on the Carnegie Endowment board in Washington, and it is incredible how they left most of their wealth for public causes. I think that has to happen here. So if you ask me what is Bharti Foundation’s vision, it’s to be one day known like a Carnegie Endowment or a Ford Foundation or a Rockefeller Foundation. We have started well. Hopefully we will end well.” 5
    In the past, rich people in India were princely rulers or members of extended business families who had made a fortune in textiles or manufacturing. Industrialists would hoard capital, and there was a limited expectation of seeking to outbid your neighbours in gross ostentation. Since liberalization, an unbound social class had grown with extraordinary speed. Sunil Mittal’s objection to the vulgar display of wealth was not widely shared. For membersof this new global community—the Indian super-rich—geography had become flexible. They could carry their world wherever they chose and station themselves in whichever city they needed to be in at the time. Their passports, and those of their family members, might not always be Indian, but culturally their attachment to their homeland remained strong. One businessman told me he was able to compress time, and that a ten-day journey to his work sites in Mozambique could be reduced to four days by using his own plane. Invitations to house-warming parties were likely to specify any of a number of cities between Los Angeles and Hong Kong. In Mumbai, the industrialist Mukesh Ambani had built the world’s most expensive private residence, a 27-storey confection involving three floors of gardens, swimming pools, a cool room (which in the ultimate Himalayan dream blew flurries of fake snow), three helipads, a six-storey car parking garage and several “entourage rooms”—for who travels without an entourage? 6
    The steelmaker Lakshmi Mittal (no relation to Sunil) was presently the only Indian richer than Ambani. He held the principal celebrations for his daughter’s wedding in Paris, and even hired the palace at Versailles, which nobody had managed to do before. In 2006, Mittal Steel’s hostile bid for Europe’s largest steelmaker, Arcelor, had been met with dismay. The head of Arcelor, Guy Dollé, said sorrowfully that the predatory company was “full of Indians” and his own Luxembourg-based operation had no need for “monnaie de singe”—meaning money without value, which in direct translation became the insulting “monkey change.” 7 Lakshmi Mittal won the battle, Dollé was ousted and Arcelor Mittal was now the world’s largest steel company.
    I had first noticed the spread of Indian wealth about ten years ago, when I had to judge a prize in London for “Asian Women of Achievement.” In North America, “Asian” usually means east Asian, but in Europe it is often taken to mean south Asian, or more specifically north Indian or Pakistani. At the awards dinner, new money was on