Man of Steel

As Rediff would want us to believe, the whole of India is celebrating Lakshmi Mittal's progress as a billionaire, him being the 3rd richest man in the world and all but according to the following report, his raise is met with a frown in the West, more specifically in Europe, which generally has a superiority complex for some unknown reason. Salil Tripathi writes thus in International Herald Tribune.

Mittal is an immigrant in Fortress Europe, and they resent the idea of a man
from the Orient gate-crashing a carefully laid-out garden party, in which a
precise pecking order used to determine who sat where.

Mittal does not follow those rules. The Mittal group is family-owned, and
Lakshmi Mittal is a peripatetic Indian who has moved around the world with
the ease that globalization promises.

Born into a family that owned a steel mill, Mittal first went to Indonesia
and then, in the 1980s and 1990s, in countries of limited interest to bigger
companies, slowly set about acquiring and making viable steel plants that
would have otherwise gone under.

By carefully pursuing his vision and remaining focused, he built the world's
biggest steel company, and became, according to Forbes magazine, the world's
third-richest person.

Criticism naturally followed, but it had less to do with his business plan
and more with his tastes. Tabloids across Europe gleefully reported his
purchase of a palatial 12-bedroom home in London's Kensington Palace Gardens
for $127 million, a record price for a private home; or the lavish,
$78-million wedding of his daughter over five days of festivities in a
17th-century French chateau; and the £125,000 he donated to Britain's Labour
Party.

If a pedigreed European count or British lord had done any of this, it would
have been taken for granted, perhaps even termed charmingly eccentric. But
when a man who grew up in rural India does it, questions are raised suddenly
about Mittal's "methods."