One of the most widely recognized names amongst entrepreneurs in India, Mukesh Ambani is synonymous with an entrepreneurial spirit, ambition, and drive. He is the Chairman, Managing Director, and the largest shareholder of Reliance Industries Limited (RIL). In 2021, he was recognized as the 10th richest person in the world. After dropping out of Stanford to help his father grow Reliance, Mukesh has been instrumental in expanding the footprint of Reliance from petrochemicals to telecommunications, making Reliance today a giant in the Indian business ecosystem.

The biography of Dhirubhai Ambani is truly India's rags to riches story. He was a man of great vision. He showed a great temperament for business and made exponential growth exploiting every single opportunity. His phenomenal rise in the Indian industry has been one of the mostremarkable events in the Indian Business' history. He was awarded the Indian Entrepreneur of the 20th Century and was regarded as the greatest creator of wealth. The students of management schools many like to draw lessons from the life of this matriculate with great vision and business acumen. The inside pages contain an interesting and elevating story of how a poor village boy rose to become the legendary figure in the history of business what the wellestablished corporate houses of India with abundant resources could not achieve over a period of a century.

Dhirubhai Ambani's life is a rags-to-riches story, from Bombay's crowded pavements and bazaars to the city's extravagantly wealthy social circles where business tycoons, stockmarket speculators, smugglers, politicians and Hindi film stars mingle, make money, make and break marriages and carry out prolonged feuds. This is the story of a rising capitalist group in post-independence India. Until the arrival of Ambani, and now more like him, India's big business scene was dominated by a few industrial houses from British times. Ambani's Reliance group has risen to rival these houses in just 26 years since its foundation. By 1995, the group had 2.6 million investors, one in every eight Indian sharemarket investors, and is now so large that it has to hold its annual general meetings in football stadiums. Along with expansion, however, have come the intricate political connections, a whole raft of corruption charges and a rollercoaster of booms and crashes for Ambani and his company. This study shows how capitalism emerges by fair means and foul in the new industrial countries of the Third World and explores the life of an Asian tycoon.

Hamish McDonald is Asia-Pacific Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. He has been a foreign correspondent in Jakarta, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Beijing and New Delhi, where he was bureau chief of the Far Eastern Economic Review. He has twice won Walkley awards, and has had a report on Burma read into the record of the US Congress. He is the author of books on Indonesia and India, and was made an inaugural Fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs in 2008.

This is an important biography of Dhirubhai Ambani, the founder of India’s biggest business house, Reliance. He was born in Gujarat, started his business in Mumbai, and was very successful in all his ventures. He used the method of backward integration to fulfil all his dreams and turned them into a reality. His success helped India and it had a major impact on India’s industrial growth. Dhirubhai Ambani can be quoted as an example of ‘self-made man’. If a person who did not have any prior experience or proper guidance has over- come every obstacle that life has thrown on his way and reached the pinnacle, then there must be many lessons that could be learnt from his life. This book analyzes and presents these lessons in a highly coherent style.

On the life and achievements of Dhirubhai Ambani, 1932-2002, founder of Reliance group of industries.