The book chronicles the India from 1990s to 2018, from the eyes and ears of James Crabtree. He's now an academic at NUS, Singapore. He was journalist for a couple of years around 2016 in India. He has interviewed folks ranging from Adani to Jindal. Each interview typecasts into what author thinks businessmen should look like: professional hair cuts, tall and lanky and then contrasts them.
For instance, in addition to describing Vijay Mallya's gold covered bathroom in London - it might be useful to know about him more than the caricature of "public buccaneer, privately religious devout".
Deserving of India's penchant for cricket, there is an entire chapter on IPL. He presents a crisp entertaining thesis about Srini of BCCI/ICC and Lalit Modi's across multiple IPL scandals.
He spends a lot of words talking about crony capitalism, but shies away from doing any of his own primary research. In terms of specific figures or numbers, he does quote luminaries like Raghuram Rajan, which help a bit.
Also, errata: he mentions Raghuram Rajan and Jayant Sinha were friends at IIT Kharagpur. They are both IIT Delhi alumni.
The chapter on how this hurts the taxpayer funded public sector banks, which now have a ton of bad non performing assets on their books is quite amazing. Now, that I'm reading it 2 years later, it feels quite prophetic.
The author explains the mechanism by which money changes hands in India, from industrialists to politicians and bureaucrats and then back. He's clearly writing in a post-Modi world, and explains in excruciating detail how Modified India is.
The book is held together by a narrative of Schumpeter's
Creative destruction (German: schöpferische Zerstörung), sometimes known as Schumpeter's gale, is a concept in economics which since the 1950s has become most readily identified with the Austrian-born economist Joseph Schumpeter who derived it from the work of Karl Marx and popularized it as a theory of economic innovation and the business cycle.
Schumpeter was no idiot. He was Austria's Finance Minister and later a banker. He made and lost a fortune in the latter gig. I believe losing money can be a great teacher.
The job which the author does really well is to make an unemotional, yet storied case for why India is entering the Billionaire Raj.
He concludes on a hopeful note by sharing how America evolved beyond that phase into the Progressive Era. It does very little to calm your, now frayed nerves though.
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