The Visionary

When he was 12, Ash Anand’s youngest uncle took him to an open tract of land outside his home in West Bengal on the eastern side of India. “His motive was to inspire me to know that big things can be done,” Anand said. “This was that year he achieved success, and this was his proud moment. I asked him how far his land went, and he said, ‘As far as you can see.’”

But lessons can be lost on 12-year-old boys.

Anand couldn’t have known that his uncle would go on to subdivide the land into a lucrative array of apartments and event centers. Nor could the boy, who at the time had scant interest in history or the wilderness, have known that he himself would settle in a thickly wooded park a half a world away in a town called Warrensburg, where the Schroon