India has the most number of billionaires after the US

When I first came to the US in 1989 to pursue my master’s in law program, students at the university would ask me how come I had learnt to speak english so well after being in the US for only a month  or how did I go to school in India since India did not have any roads, or how is that I looked so healthy when people in India had nothing to eat and so on…

To the question about roads I would keep a straight face and reply answer nonchalantly “oh, I went on camels” (I hadn’t seen a live camel in India except in the zoo) and I would be thinking how come I know so much about the US and here I have come to do a master’s program and they are asking me “do you have roads?” how about “do you have schools and colleges?”

One of the main reason for this is because of the image that the media has been portraying till now in movies like “City of Joy” in which almost every Indian is either a leper or someone whose body part is missing and are all ready to die. In the Indiana Jones series all Indians are depicted as primitive savages who eat monkey brains and are waiting for this savior to come along and rescue them. I wonder where these film directors get their ridiculous ideas from about one of the most civilized nations in the world.

Now, fast forward a decade later and Forbes in a special report lists more billionaires in India than in any other Asian nation. According to Forbes only the US has more billionaires than India, which means that after the US, India has the most number of billionaires. Indians have made their mark in all fields and India has world class scientists, engineers, journalists, doctors  and the list goes on…

Morgan Stanley predicts 100 billionaires in India by 2009 in these diverse fields and there is more to it than what lies on the surface. Indian companies have been acquiring western corporations and negotiating major deals. Now all this and more to come is a far cry from from “me riding a camel to school.”