The High & Mighty 2023: 50 Power People

Chronicling those whose impacts echo across our personal and professional lives

Left: The sacred ‘Sengol’, a symbol of the transfer of power from the British to India | Right: India Today’s High & Mighty List

“For thine is the kingdom,” goes the Lord’s Prayer, “the power, and the glory, forever and ever.” Let’s take one fragment first: the power and the glory. That’s one possible measure of an individual’s accomplishments in life, but it only traces the outer circumference of what is essentially an inner journey. The 50 people on our High & Mighty List were not born on another planet. Nor were those on the three supplementary lists on politics, the officialdom and Indians who made it big abroad. They are ordinary mortals, and yet extraordinary. Their little and big kingdoms were built out of each one’s special blend of savvy, will, imagination, tenacity…and sometimes the sheer force of personality. Some of them came out of anonymity to be where they are. Monika Shergill, content head of Netflix, grew up watching B&W television in Meerut. Nithin and Nikhil Kamath of Zerodha are a bank employee’s kids, regulation Bengaluru middle class. Narendra Modi’s past is legend. Even Mukesh Ambani has seen life in a Mumbai chawl and Kumar Mangalam Birla had no choice but to grow up fast after his father’s untimely demise. Both Mukesh and Kumar Mangalam grew their inherited businesses manifold. Each individual journey starts from scratch. In Rahul Gandhi’s case, it began with the Bharat Jodo Yatra last year. Fortune traces a tenuous path between flux and certitude. A Gautam Adani got to be the second-richest individual in the world, but his sternest challenge came after that. Even billionaires must expect the unexpected. Under skies lately darkened by war and pestilence, “forever and ever” is straight out fantasy. But this is the Powernama of the Present.

50 HIGH & MIGHTY PERSONALITIES

1. Mukesh Ambani

2. Kumar Mangalam Birla

3. Ratan Tata

4. Sajjan Jindal

5. Sunil Bharti Mittal

6. N. Chandrasekaran

7. Gautam Adani

8. Uday Kotak

9. Azim Premji & Rishad Premji

10. Amitabh Bachchan

11. Anil Agarwal

12. Nandan Nilekani

13. Shiv Nadar & Roshni Nadar Malhotra

14. R.C. Bhargava

15. Ajay Piramal

16. Sanjiv Puri

17. Rahul Bhatia

18. Nita Ambani

19. Naresh Trehan

20. Adar Poonawalla

21. Shah Rukh Khan

22. Anand Mahindra

23. Sanjiv Goenka

24. Virat Kohli

25. Baba Ramdev & Acharya Balkrishna

26. Kalanithi Maran

27. Jay Shah

28. Dilip Shanghvi

29. S.S. Rajamouli

30. S.N. Subrahmanyan

31. Kiran Mazumdar Shaw

32. Harish Salve

33. Nithin Kamath & Nikhil Kamath

34. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

35. Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev

36. Amit Agarwal

37. Monika Shergill

38. Sushant Sreeram & Aparna Purohit

39. Samir Jain

40. Deepinder Goyal

41. Deepika Padukone

42. Sudhir Agarwal

43. Mahendra Mohan Gupta & Sanjay Gupta

44. Byju Raveendran & Divya Gokulnath

45. Aditya Chopra

46. Pawan Munjal

47. Harmanpreet Kaur

48. Bhavish Aggarwal

49. Alia Bhatt

50. Karan Johar