The title and subtitle are very descriptive of what you will find in this book:
Billionaire Raj: focuses on stories of wealthy individuals, not India as a whole.
A journey: don’t expect nuanced theses, this is a collection of narratives with only a loose connective thread….
Through India’s new gilded age: that connective thread is that Indian development has been unequal and corrupt. The author draws shallow comparisons to the American gilded age, but I left the book feeling like the connection was weak at best.
I wanted to like this book, especially when the author starts out declaring he will not moralize the narrative that he wants to lay out. But instead, this felt like a collection of Atlantic articles describing how the author felt when he received a fancy wedding invite or stepped into the gold inlaid bathrooms of billionaires. Just about every book the author references is better than this one: Behind the beautiful forevers in poverty, any of the biographies of gilded age Titans if that is your thing, or piketty if you want to read about inequality.