In this year’s hit Bollywood movie Guru, the film’s main protagonist, a rags-to-riches businessman, gives a rousing speech against state interference in industry in the era before India’s 1991 market reforms. “When I wanted to work hard and earn, I found all doors were closed to a poor man like me,” the businessman, Gurukant Desai, rails. “But I could not take no for an answer and was prepared to do whatever it took to open the door – if it needed to be kicked down, I did it. Because I wanted to become rich.”

Loosely based on the life of Dhirubhai Ambani, the industrialist who built the country’s largest private company, Reliance Industries, the film attempts to capture the spirit of the evolution of the Indian corporate – the transition from traditional industrial groups protected by state-sanctioned monopolies to the entrepreneurial classes of today. This has been so successful that Indian companies today view themselves as globally competitive. The trend culminated this year in Tata Steel’s fiercely contested £6.7bn takeover of Anglo-Dutch rival, Corus, a deal that has spawned a wave of similar large global takeovers by Indian companies.