News
has just come of Virat Kohli, the captain of the Indian cricket team, signing
an endorsement contract for a period of eight years for more than Rs. 100 crore
with Puma, the German manufacturer of sports goods,. This has brought young
Virat in the “Rs. 100 crore Club”. Among cricketers, he is perhaps the third
player to cross the 100 crore mark with Sachin Tendulkar and Mahandra Singh
Dhoni preceding him.
But Virat has been a “crorepati” several times
over even before he signed the Puma contract. He has been on the scene for
quite some time and has acquitted himself very well ever since his debut in the
national team. No wonder, brands have been chasing him and he has been signing product
endorsement contracts that suit his persona. Slowly and surely he has developed
an iconic status among the country’s cricket-crazy youth who never seem to get
enough of him.
So,
the air in the country is getting thick with news of crorepatis and aspiring
crorepatis. For those of us who are now ancient, having been born in the first
half of the last century, the talk of crores creates a disconcerting
bewilderment. Having been born and brought up in the days of “rupees, annas and
pies” a crore of rupees seemed so distant, so formidable. The school fees used
to be paid in paises and in college it used to be a few odd rupees. Even that
would be halved if and when two or more siblings would be in the same college.
After post graduation getting a job fetching a salary from Rs. 300 to Rs. 500
would be considered creditable as it would be reckoned to be out of the
ordinary.
Parents would go looking for a groom for their
daughters whose salary would be in four figures. The classified ads used to be
littered with such ads. Nursing the ambition, the parents labored hard all
their lives to bring up their daughters nurturing them to make them good enough
for a four-figure-salaried groom. Then, even if one takes the Hindi movies of
the late 1940s or early 1950s lakhpati, a man with a hundred thousand or more
but with less than a crore, was what a businessman or an industrialist was
known as. Beyond that, a crore, was perhaps unimaginable and none would seem to
have ever bothered to attempt making a crore. Only a filthy rich or a decadent
landlord or a corrupt and black-marketeering baniya could perhaps salt it away,
if at all, and, if he managed to do that, he wouldn’t flinch from flaunting it
in the midst of the surrounding abject poverty.
The
by-and-large innocent society was seemingly administered a shock, as it were,
with the advent of Indira Gandhi whose reign in 1960s and 1970s was known for
its “briefcase” culture. Her ministers and even her younger son started playing
around with mammoth amounts of cash. One remembers LN Mishra, the then Commerce
Minister, who would get regular supplies of briefcases brimming over with cash, and would use them for ascending
channelization of their contents. The briefcases, would never be returned to
their rightful owners. Corruption had become so rampant that everybody in
politics was involved in it. Indira Gandhi’s supporters in the Parliament began
attacking her saying she was sitting on a pile of black money. The era of collecting
crores had effectively dawned, albeit, in illegitimate cash.
High inflation was a natural corollary – high
inflation breeding higher prices and still higher inflation, all the time shearing
away the value of the rupee that used to be so precious once upon a time. Then
in 1990s came the economic reforms, a change over from pseudo-socialism to
pseudo-capitalism. Business and industry, nonetheless, flourished spawning many
more crorepatis, few legit but more illegit.
To
come back to cricketing billionaires, it is only now that the game of cricket
has spawned a few billionaires. Earlier they used to be paid a pittance and
even big names like Nawab Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi was paid a very meager
allowance for a five-day test match. Those days the game was generally played
for the love of it. Things changed drastically after its professionalization.
Consequent on the acquisition of the distribution rights to TV channels, the
Board of Control for Cricket in India became the richest cricketing
organization in the world. While this shifted the centre of gravity of cricket
from London to Mumbai, the ever-flowing cash enabled it to pay handsome
retainer fees in a graded manner to cricketers of various levels in the
country. Thus there are many who have made a few crores over the last few years
even without signing mouth-watering endorsements. Then, of course, the Indian
Premier League (IPL) brought a windfall for them.
Cricket
is an area where new-age crorepatis jostle around the stadia. The other area is
the IT and Management fields where virtually every person who has come out of
IITs or IIMs is a crorepati. They are so because of their brains which fetched
them jaw-dropping packages in placements right in the institutes where they
undertook their courses. The film industry is another one where, whether you
deliver box-office hits or not, you get paid lavishly to boost your finances to
make you a crorepati. Once you put across a box-office hit you, kind of, hit
the jackpot. Multi-crorepatis in the film industry are numerous who lead a
fabled life with luxury homes in India and/or abroad and stables crammed with
luxury or high-end cars.
Businesses
and industry, of course, have their respective shares of billionaires but,
generally, they keep their financial information under wraps for fear of the
tax-man. Among the businessmen and industrialists only 97 super-wealthy were
reported by the Wall Street Journal in 2015. In an economy that boasts of being
worth more than $ 2 trillion the number of declared billionaires would seem to
be laughable. None knows who is at fault.
Likewise,
politics is another ‘industry’ that breeds every five years a large number of
super rich. Apart from the political movers and shakers, a large majority of
legislators in states and at the Centre are crorepatis. It is not that their
salaries and perks that make them so; most of them are corrupt and find myriad
ways of accumulating illegal wealth. Even the meanest politician in a municipal
corporation finds ways that facilely lead him to billions. Most of it is kept
unaccounted to be used at the time of elections to bribe voters in exchange for
votes.
India
has come a long way from those modest days of early 20th century
when it had a fat layer of hopelessly poor, a thin layer of middle classes and
a micro-fine layer of rich and well-to-do. Today, on the other hand, though
tax-paying crorepatis are reported to be only 18500 there are many more
(excluding sporting and professional billionaires) who operate under the radars
refusing to be recognized as crorepatis. While poor have shrunk in numbers the
middle-classes have inflated.
No wonder lifestyles have changed and the
market has upgraded itself to meet the demands of the rapidly generated
billions. While Big B owns four bungalows in Mumbai’s costly land and gifts
away a Bentley as a birthday gift to his son, others go for flats worth
multi-crores in London’s
Kensington or Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah or those churned out by the likes of Lodha. Likewise, while Lamborghinis and Rolls
Royces adorn the garages of super-rich, Mercedes and Audis have become passe
for our new-breed fat cats.
27th Frbruary 2017
