Billionaires’ bear market?
India’s two wealthiest individuals saw a slight dip in fortunes in 2024. Mukesh Ambani retained the top spot with $91.3 billion in 2024, but that marked a slight dip in his net worth, from $96.3 billion at the end of 2023. Gautam Adani, however, saw a sharper decline, losing $7.7 billion amid ongoing legal troubles, including a US court indictment for bribery and fraud. The fallout from a 2023 report alleging fraud and accounting irregularities continued to weigh on the Adani Group this year.
Notably, while Ambani, Adani, and Lakshmi Mittal experienced declines, the other billionaires in India’s top 10 enjoyed growth in their net worth during 2024.
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The beta age
Children born on and after 1 January 2025 will become part of the brand-new Generation Beta, marking the start of a new demographic era. The new generational group will include people born between 2025 and 2039. They are estimated to constitute 16% of the world’s population by 2035 and many of them will live long enough to see the 22nd century. While the previous generations grew in an era of digital transition, Generation Beta will take shape in a fully digitized world driven by sustainability, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and autonomous vehicles.
Also read: Plain Facts: Best of Mint’s data-driven stories in 2024
The nomenclature for generation groups follows Greek alphabets. The subsequent generations, such as Generation Gamma and Generation Delta, will adhere to this pattern, each spanning a period of 15 years.
A mixed year in sports
A lacklustre performance at the Olympics, triumph on the T20 pitch, and accolades on the chessboard — 2024 was a bittersweet year for Indian sports.
Read this | The quiet triumph of D. Gukesh
The Indian cricket team ended an 11-year ICC trophy drought by clinching the ICC T20 World Cup in June. Their stellar performance included a record-breaking 24 wins out of 26 matches, achieving the best win/loss ratio in T20I history. However, the Test side endured a historic low, suffering a 3-0 whitewash at home against New Zealand. Off the field, Rishabh Pant grabbed headlines with a ₹27 crore deal to join the Lucknow Super Giants for the 2025 season.
In chess, 18-year-old D. Gukesh became the youngest-ever world champion, while both the men’s and women’s teams clinched gold at the 45th Chess Olympiad. At the Paris Olympics, India failed to up its previous tally and managed to win only just six medals, sans gold.
Words in vogue
Each year, leading dictionaries like Cambridge, Collins, Merriam-Webster, and Oxford select a “word of the year” to encapsulate the prevailing mood, values, and trends of the past 12 months. This year, Oxford Dictionary chose brain rot to highlight the detrimental impact of consuming low-quality digital content, while Merriam-Webster picked polarization to underscore the growing political and cultural divides worldwide.
Beyond these official selections, internet culture also shaped the language of our daily discourse, popularizing words and phrases that captured the zeitgeist. Here are some of the most notable:
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₹100-crore club erodes
The box office had a lukewarm year, with only 10 films crossing the ₹100-crore milestone, down from 17 last year. Among these, Pushpa 2 and Street 2 were the standout performers, generating significant buzz and becoming the only two films to surpass the ₹500-crore mark. In total, the box office grossed ₹4,534 crore across 229 releases in 2024—a 21% decline compared to the previous year.
Also read | Re-releases save the day as Bollywood remains absent from theatres in 2024
The 2025 calendar: top picks
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