The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age By: James Crabtree

Author: James Crabtree
Narrated by: Shridhar Solanki

A colorful and revealing portrait of the rise of India’s new billionaire class in a radically unequal society.

India is the world’s largest democracy, with more than one billion people and an economy expanding faster than China’s. But the rewards of this growth have been far from evenly shared, and the country’s top 1 percent now own nearly 60 percent of its wealth. In megacities like Mumbai, where half the population live in slums, the extraordinary riches of India’s new dynasties echo the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers of yesterday, funneling profits from huge conglomerates into lifestyles of conspicuous consumption.   

James Crabtree’s The Billionaire Raj takes listeners on a personal journey to meet these reclusive billionaires, fugitive tycoons, and shadowy political power brokers. From the sky terrace of the world’s most expensive home to impoverished villages and mass political rallies, Crabtree dramatizes the battle between crony capitalists and economic reformers, revealing a tense struggle between equality and privilege playing out against a combustible backdrop of aspiration, class, and caste. 

The Billionaire Raj is a vivid account of a divided society on the cusp of transformation – and a struggle that will shape not just India’s future, but the world’s.

20M	00. Prologue + Introduction.mp3
30M	01. Ambaniland.mp3
34M	02. The Good Times Begin.mp3
34M	03. Rise of the Bollygarchs.mp3
28M	04. India Modified.mp3
32M	05. The Season of Scams.mp3
30M	06. Money Power Politics.mp3
34M	07. Cronyism Goes South.mp3
31M	08. House of Debt.mp3
30M	09. The Anxious Tycoons.mp3
33M	10. More Than a Game.mp3
30M	11. The Nation Wants to Know.mp3
31M	12. The Tragedies of Modi.mp3
14M	13. Conclusion - A Progressive Era.mp3
405M	total