On Monday, I was half an hour late for my first appointment with a series of Mumbai billionaires. Sucked into the quicksand of the city’s traffic, it took more than an hour to lurch the few miles to the offices of Anil Agarwal, the rough-tongued entrepreneur who built Vedanta from a scrap-metal business into a London-listed mining giant.
I need not have taken this long. My driver, evidently used to a life of rupee-pinching, had plunged into the traffic to avoid paying a Rs50 toll on the new Sea Link bridge, a vision in steel rising from the bustle and grime of India’s Maximum City. For the want of roughly $1, I missed most of my allotted time with a man worth more than $6bn.
The story tells you much about India. Naturally, it underlines the cavernous disparities of wealth in a country where paupers rub shoulders with the super-rich. Less obviously, it is an illustration of what Anand Mahindra, vice-chairman of the twice-eponymous Mahindra & Mahindra conglomerate, calls India’s “islands of excellence”. These are the parts of the country – physical and institutional – that function at the highest levels, surrounded as they are, by the lapping waters of chaos.