outlookindia | Is it a house or a home? A temple
to the new India, or a warehouse for its ghosts? Ever since Antilla
arrived on Altamont Road in Mumbai, exuding mystery and quiet menace,
things have not been the same. “Here we are,” the friend who took me
there said, “Pay your respects to our new Ruler.”
Antilla belongs to India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani. I had read
about this most expensive dwelling ever built, the twenty-seven floors,
three helipads, nine lifts, hanging gardens, ballrooms, weather rooms,
gymnasiums, six floors of parking, and the six hundred servants. Nothing
had prepared me for the vertical lawn—a soaring, 27-storey-high wall of
grass attached to a vast metal grid. The grass was dry in patches; bits
had fallen off in neat rectangles. Clearly, Trickledown hadn’t worked.
But Gush-Up certainly has. That’s why in a nation of 1.2 billion,
India’s 100 richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of the
GDP.
The word on the street (and in the New York Times) is, or at
least was, that after all that effort and gardening, the Ambanis don’t
live in Antilla. No one knows for sure. People still whisper about
ghosts and bad luck, Vaastu and Feng Shui. Maybe it’s all Karl Marx’s
fault. (All that cussing.) Capitalism, he said, “has conjured up such
gigantic means of production and of exchange, that it is like the
sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world
whom he has called up by his spells”.
In India, the 300 million of us who belong to the new, post-IMF
“reforms” middle class—the market—live side by side with spirits of the
nether world, the poltergeists of dead rivers, dry wells, bald mountains
and denuded forests; the ghosts of 2,50,000 debt-ridden farmers who
have killed themselves, and of the 800 million who have been
impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us. And who survive on
less than twenty rupees a day.
Mukesh Ambani is personally worth $20 billion. He holds a majority
controlling share in Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), a company with a
market capitalisation of $47 billion and global business interests that
include petrochemicals, oil, natural gas, polyester fibre, Special
Economic Zones, fresh food retail, high schools, life sciences research
and stem cell storage services. RIL recently bought 95 per cent shares
in Infotel, a TV consortium that controls 27 TV news and entertainment
channels, including CNN-IBN, IBN Live, CNBC, IBN Lokmat, and ETV in
almost every regional language. Infotel owns the only nationwide licence
for 4G Broadband, a high-speed “information pipeline” which, if the
technology works, could be the future of information exchange. Mr Ambani
also owns a cricket team.
RIL is one of a handful of corporations that run India. Some of the
others are the Tatas, Jindals, Vedanta, Mittals, Infosys, Essar and the
other Reliance (ADAG), owned by Mukesh’s brother Anil. Their race for
growth has spilled across Europe, Central Asia, Africa and Latin
America. Their nets are cast wide; they are visible and invisible,
over-ground as well as underground.
The Tatas, for example, run more
than 100 companies in 80 countries. They are one of India’s oldest and
largest private sector power companies. They own mines, gas fields,
steel plants, telephone, cable TV and broadband networks, and run whole
townships. They manufacture cars and trucks, own the Taj Hotel chain,
Jaguar, Land Rover, Daewoo, Tetley Tea, a publishing company, a chain of
bookstores, a major brand of iodised salt and the cosmetics giant
Lakme. Their advertising tagline could easily be: You Can’t Live Without
Us.
According to the rules of the Gush-Up Gospel, the more you have, the more you can have.
The era of the Privatisation of Everything has made the Indian
economy one of the fastest growing in the world. However, like any good
old-fashioned colony, one of its main exports is its minerals. India’s
new mega-corporations—Tatas, Jindals, Essar, Reliance, Sterlite—are
those who have managed to muscle their way to the head of the spigot
that is spewing money extracted from deep inside the earth. It’s a dream
come true for businessmen—to be able to sell what they don’t have to
buy. Fist tap Bro. Makheru.
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