> can command the most powerful of his country to such level of willful subservience
To me there's a disconnect between the two phrases. I don't think they were volunteering to humiliate themselves, but rather to show how close they were. Let's say hypothetically that Bill Gates had become really good pal with Jeff Bezos and that you went to an event that one of the two had organized and you saw the other serving the punch, would you say that he's being subservient?
I don't know about you, but when I hear "working as a server at a wedding attended by many powerful people", I don't think "subservience", I think "unique opportunity to make connections, and to potentially snoop insider information."
Also note, Amitabh is in his late seventies. I doubt he is interested in connections at his age.
In India, it's common for hosts to serve food as a sign of respect to their guests. Close friends and family of hosts also join. This only showed the closeness of the relationships among Mukesh and other stars. Seeing it as a subservient act isn't accurate, no big star would sign up if it were so.
Beyonce did a show too. So did a lot of Bollywood celebrities. These celebrities do paid gigs at these ultra rich wedding parties.
https://www.wmagazine.com/story/isha-ambani-wedding-india-hi...
Not too long ago, it used to be that family and friends would get together to cook for the wedding.
Or does it essentially never come up because a typical Indian would use lakh/crore instead? Is there's something like a "lakh croreaire"?
As for millionaire/billionaire, imo it's hard to tell but on HN I would infer USD. (Amitabh Bachchan's net worth is ~$400M based on a quick search.)
The North Indian equivalent is called so. Atleast, In TN we have our own version of the show, based on the same "Crore" denomination but not thus called.
Exactly. USD is almost always implied when million/billion is used
On the topic itself, it's unclear what Google's intentions are and how they could benefit from such an investment. $10B is not a big sum so is the purpose altruistic or as grease for other purposes?
Afaik, the Ambani dynasty of 2 generations has been India's richest for about 30 years now.
He gets foreign technology and just jumps in any sector with governments blessing. Be it oil and gas, infra projects or even telecom
Companies do whatever their owners tell them to do. What you are talking about one specific model of what some people think they should do and what purpose they should serve in society. A very popular and possibly even 'default' model, but only one of many.
https://blog.corplaw.ie/bid/317212/Shareholder-Stakeholder-T...
etc
that said, assuming altruism here even if there aren't immediately obvious benefits to the company would probably be a bit naive.
To be fair, Mukesh has got good connections everywhere. He is India's most powerful person.
Amitabh and the Shahrukh (some of the world's richest actors, both half billionaires) both volunteered as servers at his daughters wedding as a show of appreciation. If a man can command the most powerful of his country to such level of willful subservience, then every Govt. will try to curry favor with him.
I will add, that while his intentions might be entirely selfish, the pace at which Jio was able to bring affordable 4G to the whole country is incredibly empowering for rural / small town India.
That being said, adding money to the pool of what is quickly becoming a monopoly is not a "fund to digitize America" as Pichai put it.