The-Polyester-Prince

A FIRST-CLASS FOUNTAINDhirubhai Ambani remained in Bombay because manufacturing was only one facet ofhis business. For a decade, the textile plant at Naroda was supportive and subsidiaryto his yarn trading activities. In addition, he was steadily augmenting his skills atbreeding money from money, and at wielding political and bureaucratic influence ongovernment policies and their interpretation. Dhirubhai was never simply anindustrialist, a trader, a financial juggler or a political manipulator, but all four inone.From his earliest days in Junagadh, Dhirubhai had learned that relationships werethe key to unlocking help, and that the law could be argued with. ‘One thing I havenoted with Dhirubhai is that if he starts an acquaintance with someone he willcontinue it,’ said Manubhai Kothary, the trade group Sasrnira’s president. ‘He neverthrows away any relationship.’ He was endowed with a photographic memory forfaces and names, and any contact- however feeting - he could try to turn into acommon background on which some affection could be based. For example, SirNicholas Fenn, who was British High Commissioner in New Delhi in the early 1990s,was amazed to find Dhirubhai claiming him as an old friend from Aden. In the early1950s, Fenn had been a Royal Air Force pilot flying transports through to the FarEast and Australia. Dhirubhai remembered him from refuelling stops at the Shellfacility at Aden’s airport.philosophy was to cultivate everybody from the doorkeeper up. ‘I am willing tosalaam [bow down to] anyone,’ he told a magazine interviewer in 1985, in astatement that shocked many readers for its bluntness. In the India of economicplans and government control of the commanding heights’ that had developed by the1960s, a lot of grovelling was required for businessmen to get the clearances theyneeded. Inevitably, the bureaucratic signature needed to move a file from desk todesk came to have a price on it as well. The Congress Party had degenerated from amovement of freedom fighters into a dispenser of patronage, with ministersallocating resources and licences while the bureaucracy worked out ways to makethe process look objective.After getting on his feet back in Bombay, Dhirubhai used to make frequent trips toNew Delhi. He frequently went in the company of Murli Deora, a fellow yarn traderwho was then working his way up the Congress Party machine in Bombay. Deoralater became the head of the Bombay Municipal Corporation -the mayor- and thenfor many years the representative for South Bombay, the area containing thebusiness district and elite apartments, in the Lok Sabha (the lower house ofparliament).Dhirubhai and Deora used to catch an early fight up to Delhi, and park their bagswith a sympathetic clerk at the Ashoka Hotel while they did their rounds of politiciansand bureaucrats to speed up decisions on import licences. Too poor to afford anovernight stay, they would collect their bags and fly back to Bombay the sameevening. Later, Dhirubhai could afford to keep a room ready at the Ashoka, agovernment hotel built in a vaguely Moghul monumental style. His nephew RasikMeswani also came into the lobbying activity, and eventually selected a canny SouthIndian, V Balusubramaniam, as full-time lobbyist for Reliance in New Delhi. For thelesser bureaucrats, journalists and others who helped promote the company’s