New Delhi, Jan. 1 -- Adil Rustomjee's "Running Behind Lakshmi" is a sweeping narrative of how India's stock market slowly learned to modernize itself.
Rather than presenting market evolution as a neat sequence of reforms, the book portrays advancement as a messy, uneven process shaped by global shocks, political hesitation, technological leaps and repeated crises.
The result is a richly textured account of how an informal trading culture gradually transformed into a structured, technology-driven financial system.
Rustomjee begins with the earliest phase of Indian stock trading, when markets operated more on personal relationships than formal rules. Transactions under banyan trees in Bombay reflected a system built on trust, reputation an...