He hated capitalism and capitalists, but four decades after rejecting a corporate career, S.S. Sivakumar, now 61, has become a capitalist himself. Only, he started late. In 2004, Sivakumar, then a professor of economics at the University of Madras, sought an early retirement that was granted. Soon after, he founded Akash Ganga International (AGI), a company that makes water from, well, thin air. All his life, Sivakumar, who looks an unlikely capitalist in his casual trousers, shirt, and bushy white moustache, has been interested in understanding what makes some people rich, and others poor. At the Delhi School of Economics, where he completed his doctorate, his thesis was on this subject. He studied 200 families across three generations in rural India. His conclusion: “Affluence is a matter of chance.” S.S. Sivakumar is an economist-turned-entrepreneur. The scientific basis behind his air-to-water conversion is the heat exchange process: in this case, it involves sucking in air from the atmosphere and blowing it over cold gas, resulting in the creation of water That discovery changed his political viewpoint. “By the time I finished the field work, the Naxalite in me died,” says Sivakumar, referring to the term used to describe a school of thought adopted by militant followers of a kind of Maoist communism. His interest in understanding the genesis of wealth did not. In 1984, with wife Chitra, a sociologist, Sivakumar embarked on a decade-long research study on class (wealth), caste, and resources such as water and land. By the end of the study, he was convinced that water, or the absence of it, held the key. | 
