Traveling around India, I became fascinated above all by the empire builders: those who grew powerful in politics and business during the mid-2000s boom and were then forced to grapple with their aftermath, especially as the tide began turning after Modi’s election victory in 2014. These were people who dealt with India as they found it, not as they would have liked it to be. They displayed ambitions on a scale that no longer seemed possible in the sanitized capitalism of the West. Even the vocabulary used to describe them was dredged up as if from a different era: baron, boss; magnate, mogul;
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