India Shining – The world´s most expensive private residence
One of India´s richest industrialists, Mukesh Ambani is about to move into his new home on Altamount Road, which cost him a cool 1.9 million US dollars to build. The building´s interior floor space is larger than the Palace of Versailles and it will take 600 servants to keep the family of six in gold covered samosas. Apparently it´s modeled on the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Meanwhile some 800 million people in India survive on next to no money and forty percent of the population of the world´s largest democracy will starve tomorrow if they don´t get their government hand-outs.
Here are some of them.
That said, the Independent reports that things don´t stand much better in the UK, where 0.6 percent of the population own 69% of the land. And this at a time when the new conservative government is introducing austerity measures that will make those few landowners even richer. Mind you, the same 0.6 percent owned all that a hundred years ago as well. As the really very good opinion piece by Johann Hari mentioned, Mao killed some 30 million Chinese in order to wrest his country from a small gang of rich men who owned all the land.
Will the walls of the world´s Ambanis be high enough when the levy breaks?
As a toast to the boundless greed of our times, here´s my take on another symbol of financial lunacy and vulgar display of riches, the Burj Khalifa Tower in Dubai.
