There’s a world of difference between the billionaires of the world’s largest democracies. In the US, entrepreneurs who rise above the herd are empathetic towards their less capable brethren left behind. This empathy prompts magnanimity. They make large contributions to charities, trusts and their alma maters. On the other hand, India’s new rich rarely sympathise with the plight of the masses heaving and sweating at the base of this country’s iniquitous socio-economic pyramid.
In the garden city of Bangalore dominated by the big bucks IT and ICT corporations which is experiencing a huge digital divide threatening to permanently infantalise thousands of out-of-school children, the city’s fat cat billionaires are busy purchasing luxury homes and properties instead of addressing this ballooning problem.
According to local media reports, in June, Infosys co-founder and former managing director Kris Gopalakrishnan who resides in a palatial home in the so-called Billionaires Row in Bangalore’s upscale Koramangala suburb, purchased another villa for Rs.76 crore in the same neighbourhood. Earlier in April, he had acquired a residential property for Rs.36 crore. Likewise, Ashok Kumar Nedrumalli, promoter-director of the temping company TeamLease, splurged Rs.24 crore on a residential property in tony Kasturba Road.
This love of luxury and epicureanism that’s spreading in this iniquitous professedly socialist society, is the mirror opposite of America’s generous plutocrats for whom philanthropy is a natural outcome of personal affluence. Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Hershey, Rockefellers and thousands of America’s super-rich reside in relatively modest self-serviced homes but have lavishly endowed libraries, gymnasia and sports fields in campus America.
Unschooled in history, India’s techie billionaires are living it up on tiny oases in a creeping desert of poverty. Like the Russian nobility a century ago, they’ll be the last to learn that the commies are coming.
