The rich might want to photoshop India for the world, but does it ever discuss the other India? You celebrate our new cash-rich economy, yet 5 or 6 states have slipped further down the poverty line. Where does nation-building fit into all of this?
But to answer your question, except for politically correct forums, in all these years, I have never heard the uber-rich discuss the have-nots. They are just not interested! They are in denial. It’s not a part of their scripted dream, so why must they have to deal with it? Their conversation is always about making more money and enhancing lifestyle. Clothes, exotic villas, cars, bags, price of diamonds, gizmos. The women’s distress scale is measured by whether they have bought the correct bag or not (the price of just one of these bags could feed ten poor families for a year.) But there is a reason for this. The super-rich in India today are mostly first-generation rich, so their attitude to money is very different. They haven’t quite grown into a full sense of security about it, they are almost overwhelmed by their own capacity to spend. I am fascinated by this new money. There is an attempt to be casual, but they really want to be acknowledged as belonging to the billionaire’s club. They have a kind of schizophrenic reaction to money — maybe it’s a hangover from their parents’ days. So there are multibillionaires who are so wealthy the next five generations could live off them, and their 12-year old sons might ask them to buy them Porsches, yet they will count the sandwiches on their private jets or haul up their staff for changing the flowers before they have drooped.
In this, the idea of corporate governance or social responsibility is a very new thing. But you have to see it in the context of India being a very young nation. The Ambanis, Ruias, Mahindras, Mittals — all first and second generation rich — are only just waking up to the idea that’s there’s something called giving back. It may take a few years more — even another generation — but slowly you will see the beginnings of an endowment mentality. With the new globalisation of thinking, as India’s super-rich travel the globe and meet the world’s biggest philanthropists — Bill Gates or Warren Buffet or even an Anita Roddick who said, let my children make their own wealth, and has willed most of her empire to her favourite charities — it will take time, but slowly I believe a new kind of thinking will set in.
