Author : Sunil Sharan
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 128 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (635 download)
Book Synopsis Saga of the Ambanis by : Sunil Sharan
Download or read book Saga of the Ambanis written by Sunil Sharan and published by . This book was released on 2020-07-04 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The saga begins with the wedding of Mukesh Ambani's daughter, Isha Ambani Piramal. It then goes back to talk about the patriarch of the family and the founder of the empire, Dhirubhai Ambani. Ambani hails from the Indian state of Gujarat. Instead of working for others, Gujaratis mainly ply their own businesses. Many of the motels and hotels in America are owned by Gujaratis.Dhirubhai's quest to become someone took him to Aden (now in Yemen) in the fifties. He worked first as a gas station attendant there, and then was promoted to a clerical job. He returned to India with Indian Rupees 50,000, an enormous sum in those days, in his pocket. That he could save so much money in the relatively petty jobs that he held in Aden is testament to his frugality. His older son, Mukesh, was born in Aden.Upon his return to India, Dhirubhai started a business exporting spices. His family was now his wife, Kokilaben; two sons, Mukesh and Anil; and two daughters. All of them lived crammed in a two-room chawl (best described as a shared house, similar to the projects in Paris, only the Ambanis shared the single communal bathroom with a hundred other families) in Mumbai. Imagine that! And now the Ambanis, just 40 years later, live in the most expensive house in the world, the storied 27-storey Antilia, built in one of Mumbai's most posh neighbourhoods and staffed with 600 servants. I am sure their servants have more hygienic facilities than from where the Ambanis originated.Dhirubhai died in 2002. When he died, he was worth over $6 billion. India had never seen a Horatio Alger rags-to-riches story like his. From spices he expanded to polyester to petrochemicals and then to oil and gas. Dhirubhai certainly had the nous for entrepreneurship, but he also played the system and bent the rules furiously. He grew close to the country's prime minister, Indira Gandhi, and finance minister (later president) Pranab Mukherjee. Dhirubhai famously said that his biggest customer was no one else but the Indian government.He married his older son, Mukesh, to Nita, and the younger son, Anil, to Tina. As is customary in an orthodox Gujarati family as his, both the brides were Gujarati. Nita he saw at a dance appearance where the petite danseuse was performing Indian classical dance. He was taken in by her looks--fair and pretty--fairness of course almost being a sine qua non for prettiness in India. He invited her home to meet his son, Mukesh.Mukesh of course had no choice in the matter. If his father approved of a girl, he just had to go along for the ride. So he took Nita on a ride in the family's old Fiat car on a road adjacent to Mumbai's seafront. Those were the days of socialism in India; even if you were rich, you did not show it. How this would change twenty-five years later! The Fiat stalled midway, and the suitor and the suited had to hail a taxi, another Fiat, back home.Anil's case was different. Nita came from a conservative middle-class Gujarati family and therefore automatically fit into the Ambani household. Anil had no shortage of eligible brides willing to betroth him, but his heart was set on the film actress, Tina Munim. Tina was a rebel even by the standards of an Indian woman of today. After relationships with other actors that she never concealed, she went on to live with a still-married much older superstar of yore, Rajesh Khanna. Anil was not fazed by Tina's past, but Dhirubhai was.After Anil refused to marry anyone else for years, Dhirubhai finally relented. In an Indian joint family (where the parents and the siblings live in one house), after the sons' marriage, the mother-in-law traditionally cedes control to the elder-most daughter-in-law. Dhirubhai's wife, Kokilaben, therefore did the same with Nita. Tina felt suppressed and never really felt part of the family. How could she, with Nita being such a control freak, as she was to prove later.
