HANG-UP 1: INSECURITY
"If you want to be a millionaire, start with a billion dollars and spend all your time partying and having fun."
I once found myself having tea with the son of a billionaire on a Saturday at his well-appointed office after a long interview. It was 8 pm; outside his window the area was emptying of its taxis and commuter queues and the twinkling lights of nearby hotels had begun coming on in a city that was getting ready to party. Why was this young man - wan, sallow and bored - still behind his desk burning up the electricity bill when his peers were out gymming, primping and making plans for a weekend of high jinx and jollification? He looked at me pityingly as if I were a child, and said after a long sigh: "Remember the top ten business houses of a decade ago?" He then reeled off the names of dissipated mill owners, profligate heavy machinery producers and dissolute captains of industry. "Where are they now?" He asked rhetorically. "Do they figure anywhere in the list of top ten business houses in the country today? That's because their second generation spent its time having fun, buying planes and yachts and art, building homes in New York and Switzerland and travelling the world. And partying! If I don't work 12 hours a day, sit here on Saturday evening, and focus on growing our business, our name will also be forgotten soon. Even as we speak there are industrialists trying to reach and outdo our position."
That's when I first encountered the awful malaise called 'billionaire hang-up', otherwise known as 'the more you have, the more you have to lose' syndrome. Run your eye down any current list of Indian billionaires. Perhaps more than 70 per cent of the top names are not only vegetarian but also teetotalers, abstemious, inordinately frugal borderline ascetics. Being a billionaire comes with a whole set of responsibilities and 'Thou shalt not squander your fortunes or be seen to be' is at the top of that list. Billionaire Samir Jain and his brother, Vineet, travel economy class on domestic flights. Azim Premji is said to have once happily taken an auto-rickshaw to his office when his car didn't show up at the airport. The Hindujas live and entertain simply (no alcohol and simple traditional Sindhi vegetarian fare is served at their parties). Azad Shivdasani was often spotted with a frayed collar and there is no danger that Dilip Shanghvi will even contemplate buying a yacht!
Need one provide any more demonstrations of billionaire frugality in a country where not so long ago the Nizam of Hyderabad, then the richest man on earth, is said to have spent a lifetime scrounging for bidi stubs to save on his tobacco bills? A billionaire once confided in me with a shudder that his pleasure-seeking hedonistic self-indulgent uncle, who died young, and very happy, was the bogeyman of his childhood years. "As children we were brought up on morality tales that all emphasised how we were to never end up like him."
Billionaires (how should we put it gently?) are known to be a tad tightfisted with their billions.
From the thrifty, economical, careful, cautious and prudent to the scrimping, abstemious, abstinent, austere and the parsimonious, miserly, close-fisted and stingy, we have seen them all. It just comes with the territory.
HANG UP 2: ENOUGH IS NEVER ENOUGH
"She wears her balance sheet on her face."
You may assume that having more money than the national debt of a poor island nation would make you happy. Right? Wrong! In the circles that billionaires move in, it's never enough. At first, there's the fact that you've made it to the entry list of billionaires. From being a very rich millionaire, you enter the hallowed portals of the 10-digit number. But, of course, in the circles that matter this is a bit like purchasing a Mercedes C Class. Close, but no (Davidoff) cigar. Once there for a few years and after your presence on the list is institutionalised, there's the compulsion to inch forward, towards the middle of the list. In India, with its 46 (dollar) billionaires, this would mean being in the top 20. There, you'd not feel so much of an arriviste when you schmooze with the big boys in Davos. There, you'd expect an appointment with the finance minister without having to meet him as part of a delegation. Then you'd think the manager of Wasabi would not keep you waiting for a dinner booking as SOP. Or perhaps he still would, given it's Wasabi!
There are those who say that being in the middle of the Indian billionaire list were the happiest days of their lives - not too high up to attract too much attention, but enough to get the premier parking slot for your jet at the next IPL finals. But then, given global trends, personal ambition, individual brilliance and Laxmi's smile, there are those who come perilously close to the top of the middle section, hovering nail-bitingly close to the TOP TEN richest Indians in the billionaire list. From there, we have it on impeccable assurance, it's all downhill: too much attention from the tabloids; too many requests for philanthropic donations; too many artists wanting to paint your portraits; too many gold-digging suitors for your daughter's hand and, of course, too much energy expended on proving your billionaire chops.
From Vijay Mallya's compulsion to buy bigger, flashier boats to Laxmi Mittal's fixation on getting a six pack to Anil Ambani's marathon ambition to elder brother Mukesh inhabiting the most expensive home on the planet, the world of the super rich appears to be a relentless pursuit of more, almost something like the Olympic motto of Faster, Higher, Stronger.
And that's only what the men have to face. Their wives (not withstanding a little bit of help from their stylists, decorators, numerologists, astrologers, masseurs, florists and cosmetic surgeons) have it infinitely tougher. "I've spent the last few years of my life trying to insulate my children from the vagaries of the billionaire lists," said one sensible billionaire wife to me. "It's absolutely meaningless and interferes with their values." But all women are not as wise. Hence the bitter comment made by a billionaire wife about her peer a couple of notches above her on the list: "She wears her balance sheet on her forehead." A more damning statement about the treachery of enormous fortune is yet to be heard.
And perhaps therein lies the answer to one of the great mysteries of our time: when Hosni Mubarak made his $40 billion, why did he not stop at the first $20 billion? Could it be that his wife just didn't think it was enough to wipe the smug smile off another billionaire wife's face?
HANG-UP 3: AN EMBARRASSMENT OF RICHES
"Less is more."
The wife of a man who on the threshold of the Rubicon (almost a billionaire if he could curtail his penchant to order everything on the menu at restaurants) once said to me with genuine puzzlement: "There was a time when I would go to Harry Winston in New York and get genuine pleasure in buying what I liked. But now, when I can afford just about anything, it's all so confusing; there's not as much fun anymore." There is something quite absurd about people who have so much money that they can't go through it in several lifetimes, let alone count it. And if they don't regard their positions with a sense of hilarity and wonderment, they miss the point altogether.
Observe Alice Walton, the endearingly loopy heiress to the Walmart fortunes, as she takes visitors around her life's project, Crystal Bridges, a museum of American art, in her hometown, Bentonville, Arkansas. Divorced, single, arrested more than once for DUI offences and childless, the deep connection she has to her beloved paintings and the memory of her long dead Mama speak of a chilling loneliness and disconnect with the bumps and grinds of ordinary mortals like us.
Most billionaires are eccentric, yes, but none so profoundly weird, it appears, as the insular dyed-in-the-wool, American specimens like hygiene stricken Howard Hughes whose yellowed fingernails and unkempt beard ought to serve as another kind of much feared bogeyman for billionaire kids.
But truly, when you have the money to buy everything your heart desires, how much fun is there left in buying anything? Is that what makes them a bit loopy? Not a billionaire, but certainly as crazy as any of his American eccentric peers on that list, Michael Jackson's antics in an antique store in Europe is a chilling indictment of the phrase "less is more".
The more he buys, the less pleasure it gives him. Add that to a penchant to hang out with a pet chimp, sleep in an oxygen tent and attempt to change your race and you can see why the Bible made it easier for camels to pass through a needle's eye than for rich men to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
But having said that, and with all their hang-ups, billionaires, like the rest of us, come in all shapes and sizes, all manner of types and categories too innumerable to generalise on.
The best of them realise that having become a billionaire through destiny, hard work, fortitude, ambition or just a blip in the global exchange, there is more to life - an entire universe lies outside waiting to be explored. "Bring me the cosmologists on the creation of time, the analysts of the Holocaust, the philosopher who has married into neuroscience, the mathematician who can describe the beauty of numbers to the numbskull, the scholar of empires' rises and falls, the adepts of the English Civil War," novelist Ian McEwan wrote in another context about his momentary bouts of disillusionment with the novel. "Will a novelist," he enquired (but he could be addressing the poor billionaire), "please tell me why the Industrial Revolution began, or how the Higgs Boson confers mass on fundamental particles, or how morality evolved, or what Antonio Salieri thought of the young Franz Schubert in his choir?" He might as well have asked, "Or explain why it is that some people are so poor that all they have is money?"