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born in an impoverished village, at 16
he goes off to Aden to learn business. He returns 10 years later and
starts a small company. By canny trading around the textile bazaars of
Bombay, he corners the market in imported polyester, starts his own
factory, outwits sclerotic bureaucrats in New Delhi who are trying to
run the economy by regulation, and ultimately ignites the moribund
Indian stock market with his vision of turning Reliance into a
petrochemical and oil refining empire—a dream he realized not long
before he died.
Mohandas
Gandhi and Dhirubhai Ambani were the two most famous scions of the
Modh Bania, a Hindu commercial caste based in the arid Saurashtra
peninsula of India's western Gujarat state.
Each changed India. Ambani's public wore his textiles as durable
suits and glittery saris. Indians invested by the millions in his
Bombay-listed Reliance Industries, a sprawling conglomerate with
$12.3 billion in annual sales that recently became India's first
privately owned entrant to the Fortune 500. When Ambani died on July
6 at age 69 after nearly two weeks in a stroke-induced coma, the
country's media recounted his rags-to-riches life as an Indian
morality play.
Ambani's his great
achievement was that he showed Indians what was possible. With no
Oxford or Yale degree and no family capital, he achieved what the
Elite "brown sahibs" of New Delhi could not: he built an ultramodern,
profitable, global enterprise in India itself. What's more, he
enlisted four million Indians, a generation weaned on nanny-state
socialism, in an adventure in can-do capitalism, convincing them to
load up on Reliance stock.
Still, Ambani seems destined to be remembered as a folk
hero—an example of what a man from one of India's poor villages can
accomplish with non-shrink ambition.
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