James Crabtree begins this story of twenty-first century India with the December 2013 Mumbai car crash in which it was alleged, a young member of the Ambani family was involved. The crash involved an Aston Martin registered under the name of Reliance Ports, a Reliance Group company.

Crabtree, then a journalist with The Financial Times based in Mumbai began casually investigating the case and soon found himself arriving at a reckoning of the incredible wealth combined with political power that India’s super-rich wielded. The stark juxtaposition of this immense wealth with the crushing poverty that coexists with it in India’s sprawling megapolises is a story Crabtree tells with a flourish.

The book’s subtitle, India’s New Gilded Age is a reference to the period of American history from 1870-1900, when led by its new intrepid explorer-entrepreneurs such as the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts and the Carnegies, who made their money in railroads, oil and steel, America rose to become the world’s biggest economy. At the same time, its cities were crammed with waves of immigrants, who lived in squalor and worked impossibly long hours in its factories at meagre pay.

For Crabtree, the present time is India’s own ‘gilded age’ with its own curious mix of powerful billionaires, indigent masses and growing international clout. He calls the newly-minted Indian billionaires ‘Bollygarchs’ — a spinoff of the term Oligarch, more commonly used for post-Soviet Russian oil billionaires, who own enough wealth to influence political outcomes, and often do.

Today, there are over a hundred dollar billionaires in India, who coexist with some of the highest levels of extreme poverty in the world. How this extreme wealth was tied to the ‘season of scams’ that included the Commonwealth Games scam, the spectrum scam, the coal scam among others, is the subject matter of Crabtree’s gripping story.

2. Half The Night Is Gone