topics: |  biography | india | business

Married into India's Piramal business family, which runs india's leading
baggage company and its second largest Pharmaceuticals,  Gita Piramal belongs
to the same social class as the people she describes, and clearly has insider
access.
While the writing is somewhat dry, considering the flamboyant and colourful
nature of the seven subjects, it is still the primary reference on their
lives and their empires.

"Business Maharaja" is easy to read and offers a rare look at third world
tycoons whose reputations in India far surpasses either that of a John
D. Rockefeller or a Bill Gates.

Contents

 Introduction
 - Dhirubhai Ambani
 - Rahul Kumar Bajaj
 - Aditya Vikram Birla
 - Rama Prasad Goenka
 - Brij Mohan Khaitan
 - Bharat and Vijay Shah
 - Ratan Tata
 Appendix
 A Note on Sources
 Select Bibliography
 Index.

Other business lives

	[These are some books that were on the anvil in 1998, according to
	Binoo John and Nandita Chowdhury.  Many of them I never heard of since
	 then - did they make it? ]

Abruptly and rather unexpectedly, there has emerged the contours of a market
waiting to know more about Indian business and the men who run it. And many
biographers are off the blocks to write racy biographies. Even as Minhaz
Merchant's biography of Aditya Vikram Birla, published a few months back,
clawed its way to the bestseller lists, Viking has been putting together a
book on the Tatas and hcl's Shiv Nadar. And film journalist-turned-biographer
B.K. Karanjia, who just finished two volumes on the Godrejs, is working on
yet another biography on Naval Godrej, apart from helping out (read
re-writing) Sohrab P. Godrej with his memoirs. Piramal's third book Business
Legends, which looks at the old Indian business families, is also being
released soon. "There is certainly a renewed interest in business biographies
and corporate profiles. This could stem from the fact that this is an area
where there is little documentation and a lot of interest," says Karanjia.

Surprisingly, publishers in the West are getting involved
too. Apart from Piramal's book, an unauthorised biography of Dhirubhai
Ambani, The Polyester Prince by veteran Australian journalist Hamish
McDonald, is being published by Allan & Unwin in Australia and HarperCollins
in India in October. In the US, a fictional work, The Burning Ghats, which
parodies the Ambani saga with the story of a fertiliser salesman called
Amlani who sells dung as fertiliser, is being published soon by Ivy
Books. Indian tycoons are not exactly the flavour of the month, but they are
finally getting a look-in.