Clay-Footed Titans

A survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that Hindus now outrank Jews as the most affluent religious group in the United States: 65 percent of Hindus reported household incomes over $75,000, against 58 percent of Jews. Several Indian Americans, the vast majority of whom are Hindu, occupy the top echleons of U.S. corporations: Indra Nooyi as Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo, Vikram Pandit heads up Citigroup, and Ajit Jain is widely tipped as the leading candidate to succeed Warren Buffet as head of Berkshire Hathaway. Some, such as Bharat Desai, Vinod Khosla, Romesh Wadhwani and Amar Bose, have even made the Forbes’ billionaires list.

The economic success of the community is deserving of celebration. But the singular focus on wealth to the exclusion of the richness and diversity of the human experience has had a distorting effect on Indian public life. This never-quenching thirst for money prods even India’s premier academic institutions, such as the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management, to court  and honor not scholars and scientists, but instead their rich alumni, many of whose only claim to fame is their banslewk accounts, not always well deserved. Even religious, social and cultural organizations routinely celebrate  affluent Indians with a sharper eye on their pocket books than their souls, and national awards, such as the Padmas and the Pravasi Bharatiya Samaan, oftentimes bear the stench of cattle-style auctions. At public events, this summer, Indian millionaires and billionaires, with little to commend them beyond their glitzy homes and cars, will lecture the riff-raff on the meaning of success and life, and pontificate on everything from social policy to the Vedas to charity.

The slew of recent financial scandals in which so many Indians have been ensnared is the natural corollary of the community’s fixation with wealth. The trial of Galleon founder Raj Rajaratnam opened a window to the shady Wall Street underworld of insider trading. Rajaratnam is Sri Lankan and the largest cohort of his accomplices was South Asian, including Rajiv Goel, a former executive at Intel, and Anil Kumar, a former director at McKinsey. Even more shockingly, the trial exposed one of the earliest and most esteemed Indian business icons. Rajat Gupta, former managing partner of McKinsey, stands accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of insider trading, including breaching his fiduciary duties as a director of Goldman Sachs.

The frequently snide and snarky exchanges in the secretly recorded conversations played at the Rajaratnam trial paraded the duplicity, jealousy, private insecurities and pettiness of swaggering business titans who supposedly had it all. What a contrast from their public persona! Take this 2006 convocation address by Rajat Gupta at the Indian School of Business, which he helped found: “It is easy to make short term compromises that push you ahead. That won’t give you happiness or peace of mind. Sometimes in the quest of making everybody around you happy or what you think they want, you may not do the right thing. Unfortunately or fortunately, you have to live with yourself longer than you have to live with anybody else. So be true to yourself, be value driven.”

As was often his wont in his public speeches, Gupta closed with a verse from the Bhagwad Gita: “You have the right to work, but never to the fruits thereof. Not only should you do your very best, but you have to do it with your best intention.”

If only Gupta had been more Arjun and less Krishna, he might have sought the very benediction he was bestowing upon the starry-eyed ISB students for himself.