Who wants to be a billionaire?

I guess it's all in the numbers: for women, it's the rigour of 36-24-36 or "size zero" and for Bollywood stars, it's the Rs 100-crore box-office success and, more recently, eight-pack abs. For businessmen, it's the entry into the billionaires' club.

What does it exactly mean to defer to the tyranny of numbers? Being a billionaire means you achieve a certain finite number of zeroes on your bottom line and not a penny more or less will do. Because far from being a state of mind or a way of life, a billionaire can only be a person with a net worth of at least one billion (1,000,000,000) units of a major currency, like the the US dollar, the Euro or the Pound Sterling.

This means, of course, that you could live a life of unprecedented wealth, of imagination, creativity and adventure, achieve great recognition and accolades, be a leader among men and an inspiration to many - without ever making it to the billionaires' club.

Of all the billionaires I have met, I can safely say that very few of them display any difference in behaviour before or after they have achieved this great distinction. Verily, they more or less behave the same, eat at the same restaurants, wear the same clothes, read the same books and throw more or less the same sort of parties. No one would have known that they had been granted entry to the hallowed billionaires' club until some busy body magazines began collating information on who made it to the club and who didn't.

It is when their names make the cut that funny things begin to happen. People around them - from their mothers-in-law to their milkmen - begin regarding them differently. They begin treating them as "billionaires", as men who possess a net worth of at least one billion units of a major currency. It is a rude awakening for these gentleman and ladies. How do you go from being an ordinary Joe one day, with your quotidian woes of halitosis and stomach ulcers, to being a billionaire the next, when you actually don't feel very different on the inside and your face examined in the shaving mirror that morning is more or less the same?

Well, since you can't change much from the inside, you begin by making changes from the outside. You buy dinky little yachts, spiffy jets, a fleet of luxury sedans and a couple of sportsmobiles. Then you wait to see if you feel like a billionaire. When it becomes apparent that you don't, you go ahead and change some more: new homes, new wives, new friends, new lovers, new passions, new businesses.

Feel any different? No? So you buy yourself some more billionaire props. You discover causes you want to espouse, countries you have never visited and ambitions you have never realised.

Having made it to the billionaires' club, you realise it's no fun and it comes with its own baggage. You have to live up to other people's assumption of what you ought to be. Sometimes you find yourself looking back wistfully to the days when you hadn't earned that last accursed dollar that got you entry into this exclusive club. Sometimes you long for your good old pre-billionaire days.

But it's too late. You're stuck in the billionaires' club. Until, of course, someone somewhere collates that your wealth has depreciated and you do not belong to the club any longer. Then, your milkman and mother-in-law offer apt commiserations.

Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer
malavikasmumbai@gmail.com