Dhirubhai Ambani

At 16, he left his village and took a job in Yemen for ₹300 a month.

His job was to check fuel at a petrol pump and do clerk work.

Forty years later, 12,000 people filled a football ground in Mumbai just to attend his company's shareholder meeting.

If you think you need a rich family to build something huge, read the story of Dhirubhai Ambani.

He was born in 1932 in Chorwad, a small village in Gujarat. His father was a school teacher. There was no money at home.

In 1948 he sailed to Aden in Yemen and joined a trading company as a clerk. He spent ten years there watching how traders, ships and prices work.

In 1958, he came back to India with almost nothing.

He started Reliance Commercial Corporation with his cousin. Starting money: about ₹15,000.

The office was a 350 square feet room in Masjid Bunder, Mumbai.

Ek table. Teen kursi. Ek phone.

He sent spices out of India and brought polyester yarn in.

In 1966, he stopped trading and built his own cloth mill in Naroda, Ahmedabad. He made his own brand, Vimal, named after his brother's son.

Then came his smartest move.

Banks and big brokers did not take a village trader seriously. So in 1977, he skipped them and went straight to ordinary people.

Reliance sold shares to the public. About 58,000 people bought them, most of them investing for the first time in their life. Small town clerks, teachers, shopkeepers.

He kept talking to them like partners. In 1985, his shareholder meeting was held at Cooperage football ground with 12,000 people. A foreign newspaper called it the biggest company meeting in the world.

Then the market tried to break him.

In April 1982, a group of big traders sold about 11 lakh Reliance shares they did not even own, hoping the price would crash. Short selling = selling shares you don't own, planning to buy them back cheaper later

Dhirubhai's brokers quietly kept buying. On settlement day, the traders had no shares to give. The Bombay Stock Exchange had to shut for three days.

He won that fight completely.

Now the hard truth.

His rise was never clean and simple.

In Parliament, the government said money had come into Reliance from unknown companies based in a tax haven. Paisa kiska tha? Nobody could prove it.

A big newspaper ran a long campaign against him. Rivals said he got government rules changed to suit his factories. Most of it was never proved in court.

A stroke in 1986 paralysed his right hand. After that he ran the company through his sons.

He died in 2002 at 69. Forbes had put his wealth at about $2.9 billion.

Today Reliance is India's most valuable company.

He did not start with money, an English education or contacts. He started with information, nerve, and 58,000 strangers who trusted him.

✍🏻 Mantra Joshi

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