The Man Who Would Be King
On the plus side, it's a fairly short story (~17,000 words) by Rudyard Kipling that lies outside the clutches of rent-seeking copyrights. Negatives might include the reasons why a George Orwell called Kipling a "jingo imperialist", though this work does deal with the sordid underbelly of an empire and the hijinks of a pair of, uh, entrepreneurs who these days might fit neatly into the 'gig economy' caste.
Part of the tale is told by a perhaps unreliable narrator, so who knows how much of that is fabrication; certainly a mountain-dwelling race of Englishmen who somehow know certain Freemason signs and are precisely situated to fend off the menace of the Russian Empire seems rather more towards the wishful side of thinking. It's not often a duck shows up carrying leeks. Kipling might be leaning on the myth of Prester John, that there was a Christian nation somewhere, out there, among all the backwards heathen savages (whose civilizations were generally better off than anything in Europe when the myth was most popular). "The rain follows the plow" is another instance of such magical thinking.
There is also something of a rant about newspaper production in the subcontinent, and mentions of budget screwups, so dreaming up an adventure somewhere else might be a nice bit of fantasy as the world burns.
Overweening ambition has also been a thing for those higher up in the caste system, and has had just as bad results as the pair in Kipling's story.
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