Ambani & Sons by Hamish McDonald; Lotus Roli; Price: Rs.395; 396 pp
No individual in the history of Indian business — arguably in world business history —has impacted his host society as cataclysmically as the late Dhirubhai Ambani (1932-2002). Within the quarter century after Reliance Textile Industries (later Reliance Industries Ltd) went public in 1977 and he breathed his last in the summer of 2002, he not only transformed RIL into India’s premier business enterprise in terms of market capitalisation, sales revenue and number of shareholders, he also changed the face of Indian business, metamorphosed the stockmarket and made India Inc a force to be reckoned with in world business. Yet to assess the measure of Ambani’s contribution to national development purely in terms of his business achievements is to completely misread and misinterpret the extraordinary impact he has had upon the Indian psyche, politics and the direction and pace of national development in the world’s most populous democracy.
Informed opinion differs on the socio-economic benefits of the adventurist, high-risk business style, reminiscent of the early 20th century robber barons of America, adopted by Ambani to grow his business enterprise from a door-to-door yarn trading proprietary firm into a multibillion dollar corporation. RIL straddles the vertically integrated polyester textiles and fibres industry (i.e crude oil exploration and refining, cracking (naphtha, paralxylene, polypropylene etc)) and the new economy (telecom, power, energy and entertainment) like a colossus (revenue: Rs.200,400 crore in the fiscal year 2009-10), contributing 3 percent of the nation’s GDP.
In this admirably researched and eminently readable unauthorised biography of Ambani and his controversial sons Mukesh and Anil — an updated version of his Polyester Prince (1998) which was reportedly entirely bought out by the Ambanis and dumped into the Arabian Sea — Hamish McDonald, former Asia Pacific editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and bureau chief of the Far Eastern Review, reveals how in the process of accelerating the growth of RIL into the largest and most influential business juggernaut in Indian history, Ambani steamrollered all opposition, suborned public officials, and played kingmaker in New Delhi and several state capitals.
The fast track transformation of an undistinguished petrol station clerk in Aden who returned to India in 1958 to start as an itinerant yarn vendor into the country’s most powerful businessman is of particular interest to your reviewer, because I was among the first people to discern and chronicle his indefatigable drive and ambition. In 1977 when Reliance Textile Industries Ltd went public after the company’s annual sales turnover crossed Rs.100 crore, I wrote a cover story on the company and its promoter in Business India, predicting a great future for both. However in the mid-1980s, when I mildly criticised Ambani for suborning and weakening the governance system, I fell out of favour and was perhaps the only journalist not invited to his sons’ weddings.
Written in an engaging style of a thriller, Ambani & Sons comprises 23 chapters. McDonald traces the early life of Dhirubhai from his schooling in Junagadh, Gujarat after which like many Gujaratis from the harsh Kutch-Kathiawar region where “following the long tradition of boys from Bania families in Kathiawar”, he started working at age 16 with Besse & Co, a major trading conglomerate in Aden. In 1958 with his savings of 29,000 East African shillings (approx. Rs.25,000) together with Chambaklal Damani, he started the Reliance Commercial Corporation engaged in the business of trading in synthetic nylon, viscose and polyester yarn, then in great demand and mainly imported against Rep (replenishment) licences granted to exporters of textiles.
With his trading experience in Aden, Ambani soon established himself as a major player in the market which inevitably emerged for Rep licences. The rest of this engrossing narrative — which at another level is also a history of the struggle for liberalisation of Indian business and industry from the dead hand of business illiterate politicians and bureaucrats who had mired the Indian economy in the Hindu rate of growth for over four decades — details the meteoric rise of Ambani into a guru of the equity cult, assiduous cultivator of upper echelons in Central and state governments, formidable adversary (of Indian Express publisher Ramnath Goenka and textiles tycoon Nusli Wadia), and creator of India’s most successful and wide ranging business empire.
Far from being an Indian-style hagiography, Ambani & Sons highlights the amorality, manipulative skills and killer instinct of this extraordinary business tycoon. Moreover as promised in the title, this unauthorised biography doesn’t end with the death of Dhirubhai. The subsequent Mahabharat between his two sons upto the peace brokered by their mother Kokilaben is also chronicled maneouvre by counter-maneouvre, and the narrative ends with a wry observation that Ambani and sons have turned the abstemious legacy of another famous member of the Modh Bania tribe — Mahatma Gandhi — on its head. Mukesh and his family of five have recently moved into the most expensive residential building in global history. And it pertinently notes that between them — even if they are estranged — the Brothers Ambani have accumulated an aggregate fortune larger than of Bill Gates, the world’s wealthiest individual (net worth: $54 billion or Rs.243,000 crore). Nor is it a coincidence that India — or at least middle class India — has transformed into an unabashed consumer society.
After reading this riveting account of the founding and establishment of India’s most powerful corporate dynasty which now seems unstoppable, the discerning reader is likely to draw up a balance sheet to assess the contribution of Ambani and sons to the growth and development of the Indian economy and society. On the positive side, he did society a monumental favour by ending the insolence of office of the neta-babu nexus transforming the bureaucracy from gate-keepers into the mewing kittens of India Inc, and teaching Indian industry to think big.
But on the negative side, instead of smashing the neta-babu nexus, he co-opted it with industry. The consequence is the spreading cancer of corruption within the country’s establishment as evidenced by scams and swindles which are now routine in Indian society. Today not a single paper moves within the Central and state governments without bribes and speed money. This may turn out to be the most enduring — and disastrous — legacy of Ambani and sons to this floundering republic.
Dilip Thakore
Chilling narrative
The Truth about Me — A Hijra Life Story by A. Revathi; Penguin India; Price: Rs.299; 304 pp
Sexual minorities universally suffer deep-seated prejudice and discrimination — at the hands of the state and wider society — even in countries where their rights are guaranteed by law. In India, where transgenders (aka hijras) are not acknowledged legally, their harrowing plight is unknown to the great heterosexual majority which isn’t just indifferent, but relentlessly hostile to them.
This is the first-ever autobiography of an Indian transgender. In a chilling narrative of her life and times, Revathi, now a prominent hijra rights activist working with an NGO in Bangalore, recounts the horrors and humiliations of her tumultuous and frightening life. Born a male in a peasant family of modest means in a village in Tamil Nadu, Doraisamy (as he was named by his parents) discovered — as many gay men do — early enough in his childhood that his leanings were entirely different from other boys of his village. At school, he shunned boys’ games, preferring to play with girls and cross-dressing with his mother’s clothes. While growing up, instead of shedding his feminine side, Doraisamy is inexorably drawn towards it, although trapped, for no fault of his own, within a male body.
In his late teens Doraisamy fled home, unable to bear the constant torment he had to suffer from his family and neighbours. He took a train to Delhi, where he found himself in the mean streets of a world entirely different from his native backwater. There he meets a group of hijras, who take him under their wing. He begins living as a member of a hijra household, observing complex rituals and customs specific to the community and which the book describes in intricate detail.
Finally, the head or guru of the hijra household agrees to ritually initiate him into the community — an initiation which required Doraisamy to have his male sexual organs removed. The options are a surgical excision in a hospital or castration by a community member, using a primitive and painful method. The latter is dangerous, and can even be fatal, but men who become hijras in this manner are accorded greater respect in the community. Doraisamy chose the former. The operation is short and swift, but painful. Christened Revathi by her guru, she becomes a full-fledged member of the hijra community, no longer just a kothi, or effeminate male.
Revathi soon discovers that life as a hijra is tough, even cruel. She describes the sordid life in her guru’s home, the constant quarrels with her gurubais, fellow disciples of her guru, who are sexually and economically exploited by the latter, the threats and violence from men in the streets, the abuses she has to constantly suffer from strangers and the desperate poverty that most hijras have to face because no one is willing to employ them. Forced into badai-work, i.e singing and dancing at people’s homes on the occasion of a birth or a marriage, a custom now rapidly dying out, she gets a measure of respect in conservative Indian society.
Finally, unable to bear her hellish existence, she escapes and returns to her village, expecting her family to comfort her, only to discover that she has ceased to exist for them.
Escaping from her village to Bangalore, she meets with activists of an NGO working for sexual minorities. The NGO offers her a job, which, though modestly paid, enables her to escape her cruel life as a sex-worker. She attends activist meetings, reads literature about hijras and through her grit and intelligence begins mobilising fellow hijras to demand voter identity and ration cards.
Truth about Me is a morbid account of the lives of hijra sex-workers which they are forced to take recourse to. Its dark insights reflect the pathos and suffering of this ostracised community, and the abuses they encounter at the hands of their gurus as well as drunken men and police.
Ably translated from the Tamil by V. Geetha, a noted Chennai-based feminist, Revathi’s autobiography is a poignant voice on a pressing contemporary issue. The author fearlessly articulates her grim plight, which speaks of great courage and fortitude and translates into a powerful — and overdue — plea to regard this traditionally wronged and abused sexual minority as humans, struggling to maintain dignity in the face of despair and degradation.
Yoginder Sikand