Where have all the millionaires gone?

For some reason and many seasons now, Indian millionaires have been emigrating in droves. (Representational image: Philip Myrtorp via Unsplash)

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of another… country! For some reason and many seasons now, Indian millionaires have been emigrating in droves; they are rounding up their families, counting all their chillar, and just vamoosing from motherland.  Around 8,000 high-net-worth individuals  (HNWIs) are expected to exit the country by Christmas.

As it is, with the global economy all set to boom now that the Covid crisis seems to be ebbing a bit, billionaires and millionaires are being built by the minute. Asia will be birthplace to many of them and also the land they prosper in, but it will also be the spot they come back to holiday in, having studied and settled abroad. The number of super-rich zooming off into yonder is, mathematically speaking, 14 percent more than it was three years ago in 2019. This has been carefully calculated and confidently shared by global citizenship planning firm Henley and Partners.

India is listed among the ten countries expected to experience the highest exodus; UK, Russia, China, Hong Kong, Ukraine, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Mexico are the other fellow-nations the filthy rich are fleeing from. One imagines them crossing paths mid-air as they enter each other’s territory and the blinding bling as they high-five. All those rich men are being monitored not just by citizenship firms and visa officials, but by matchmaking mamas and matrimonial agencies!

Indian matriarchs are left reeling. Whom will the desi manic pixie dream girl bump into in a crowded street and jabber nineteen to the dozen to and marry despite the huge differences in bank balance? For a long time now movies and novels have made the frantic search for a man who has more money than he knows what to do with the very premise of a woman’s life. As Betty Grable says in the TV programme How To Marry A Millionaire, ‘All my life, ever since I was a little girl, I've always had the same dream. To marry a zillionaire.’

And for this, the bridegrooms not only have to make their fortune in India but to stay put right here. No other criterion is as important as their presence in the first place. Age, education, eyesight, sperm motility are all departments future brides may be happy to overlook any flaws in – as Lauren Bacall says in the same programme, ‘Wealthy men are never old’ – but their proximity is very much of the essence. Sexism aside, manic pixie dream boys who are broke and daydream of heiresses face the same fate, alas.

With eligible men and women eager to become the diaspora after making their mega-bucks, the traditional arranged marriage system is set to suffer the most. But there is good news for all the bachelors and bachelorettes: this country loses fewer millionaires to other countries than it makes every year. With our careful Aryabhata calculations, we may be able to nab them after they prosper and before they run. Gather ye crorepatis while ye may!