The-Polyester-Prince

company shares out and make you collapse. I am bigger than your exchange. If the
newspapers criticise, he can point out they are dependent on his advertising and he
has his journalists in every one of their departments. If the political parties take a
stand against him, he has his men in every party who can pull down or embarrass
the leaders. He is a threat to the system. Today he is undefeatable. Surprisingly, the
role played by Dhirubhai Ambani received only cautious side-references in most
books about contemporary Indian politics. No biography of him was in the
bookshops, although Indian journalists and commentators had produced 1quickie’s
biographies of other new celebrities in vast numbers. The work of the economic
historians largely cut out in the 1960s. The few biographies of other Indian
businessmen were commissioned works, not very well written, and notable for a
worshipful attitude to the subjects. No one drank, cursed, cheated or philandered.
Their workers were all part of the family. Almost everyone lived an abstemious
vegetarian life, accumulating wealth only to give it away to temples, hospitals and
schools.
By 1992, Reliance was tapping investors in Europe for funding, and international
investment funds were being allowed to play the Indian share market directly. A few
years later, the company had started borrowing in New York on a large scale. The
Ambani story was becoming of greater interest outside India, at least to investors
and perhaps to a wider audience watching the explosive growth of capitalism across
Asia. The idea of this book occurred in 1992, and I put it to Dhirubhai Ambani later
that year at a second meeting in his Bombay office. Ambani seemed receptive, and
agreed that his life story could be inspiring for a younger generation of Indians as
well as interesting to those thinking of dealing with India. I left the meeting with an
understanding that he had agreed to talk about his life at meetings to be arranged
and that, if so, I would show him the completed draft as a courtesy and listen to any
objections-but retain the final say on the content. The book would not be credible
otherwise, Ambani concurred.
A year slipped away without further progress, and then relations with Reliance took a
downturn. By the end of 1993, Reliance was in the bidding for several oilfields in the
Arabian Sea. The government oil search corporation had discovered the fields but did
not have the funds to build the huge production rigs, gas compressors and pipelines
that were needed. Several contacts among rival bidders were alleging that the
tender was being rigged in favour of Reliance. Indian politicians and bureaucrats are
masters at tilting an ‘pen and transparent’ tender into a one-horse race, by
techniques such as keeping the weighting of bidding factors uncertain or secretly
promising later con-cessions to compensate for underbidding. In the event, Reliance
swept the field, and a director with one of the losers told me: ‘we were shafted, and
for the wrong reasons.’
Writing about this would not advance my request for access to the Ambanis for the
book, but my duty was to the magazine that employed me. The first of two articles
in the Far Eastern Economic Review about the oilfields battle drew a bitter complaint
from Anil Ambani that the report was ‘defamatory’ a complaint not sent directly to
me, or to the magazine, but in a letter sent to the head of one of the rival
companies, the Australian resources giant BHP, and copied to the heads of the
American and Australian diplomatic missions in New Delhi.
Thereafter, I wrote occasionally about Reliance and, in July 1995, left my job with
the magazine to spend more time on the book. A letter to Dhirubhai Ambani
informing him of this move went unanswered. Over the following 18 months, the