The original Guru

Mohan Guruswamy Delhi

You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?’  George Bernard Shaw in Back to Methuselah (1921)

The new Mani Ratnam movie Guru has been more hyped for the off-screen romance of its two lead actors than for the quality of their work on-screen. Guru begins with a disclaimer that any resemblance to a person, living or dead, is coincidental. That is about the only fiction there is in the movie.

Guru is about the life and times of industrialist Dhirubhai Ambani, which makes it a great theme. Like any Ratnam movie, the music is delectable and the choreography top- class. Aishwarya Rai has never danced better or looked lovelier. But in the title role, Abhishek Bachchan is inadequate and exudes little of the infectious magnetism and charisma of Dhirubhai. Amitabh in Deewar endowed the role of Vijay Verma, loosely fashioned around Haji Mastan, with a larger than life personality. But young Bachchan just does not have enough in him to do justice to Dhirubhai after whom the title role of Gurukant Desai is loosely fashioned.

Mithun Chakravarthy, enacting a Ramnath Goenka patterned antagonist, turns in a performance that is powerful, restrained and dignified, without any of the real-life outbursts of passion and lapsing into scatological expression of the newspaper magnate. For that matter, even Madhavan, as the newsman, essays a role that is a composite of Arun Shourie and S Gurumurthy without resorting to the terrier-like-enthusiasm and willingness-to-please-the-master attitude that was the hallmark of the duo. Contrary to what they professed, the truth had little to do with it.

There is a small episode in passing, which shows a helpless editor in despair as the owner has the front page recast with his foxhounds’ report as the main story. Which is probably what Suman Dubey did while Goenka unleashed Shourie and Gurumurthy at Ambani and anyone else who came in the way, even Rajiv Gandhi.

The role of the Nusli Wadia look-alike is glossed over with a superficially etched characterisation that does not capture the contemptuous arrogance of those born with a silver spoon in their mouths and with which Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s grandson treated the yarn-brokering Dhirubhai. Dhirubhai Ambani once recalled how Wadia would keep him waiting in his reception room for hours before sending him off without meeting him. As Ambani would have it, it was in that reception area that the soon-to-be textiles empire germinated.

But, like most other Mani Ratnam movies, Guru will keep the cash registers ringing loud and long because it takes a great real life story and fictionalises it with dollops of rich masala into a great drama, which only a master craftsman like him can. It's rich fare that comes at a time when India is finally shedding its socialistic innocence and dynamic businessmen are treated as nation-transforming Schumpeterian entrepreneurs, rather than as parasites feeding on a resource-starved economy.

When the history of our recent times is written, the inexorable rise of Dhirubhai Ambani will be one of its more memorable chapters. Because more than the rags-to-riches quality of the Ambani saga, it is a true chronicle of the struggle to transform India from being a laboratory for Lasky inspired social experimentation into an economic powerhouse, set to takes its rightful place in the global political economy.

I first heard of Ambani in the late 1960s when my friend Marin Henry, managing director of Madura Coats (Indian subsidiary of the Scottish multinational — Coats Patons, and then a textile major), predicted to me that Reliance would soon be the leader of the textile industry because it made the best fabrics, at costs which were unthinkable for companies saddled with huge legacy costs and managerial deadweight. This was at a time when the marquee names of our textile business were now long forgotten names like DCM, Calico, Binny’s, Madura, and Tata Textiles, with only Bombay Dyeing barely surviving, mostly as a maker of bed sheets.

I also remember witnessing in the reception area of my then employer, the advertising agency HTA, a line-up of some of Bombay’s best looking girls, for Nusli Wadia’s wife Maureen, a former Air India flight stewardess, to pick models from for the company’s products. At that time, to be a Bombay Dyeing model was an endorsement of good looks that set many a beauty on the road to stardom. And such was the size of the account that HTA, which was a venerable agency even then, was willing to be the venue of a meat parade. Nusli Wadia was generally considered a business titan and his company’s advertising lionised him in Bombay’s marketing and advertising community.

So, while Ambani focused on making the best textiles and offering the consumer the best value for hard-earned money, Wadia tried to make good with high-class advertising. Dhirubhai Ambani’s Vimal was, then, nowhere on the billboard horizon. But by the early eighties, it was the brightest corporate star in the firmament and the stock market danced to the Reliance drumbeat.

What happened in the textile business happened all over. Of the top ten industrial houses in India in the early 1980s, only Tata now survives  the list. The new generation of Indian companies, many inspired by Reliance, blazed a new trail -with great economies of scale and by escaping the shackles of the license-permit Raj that, while making most existing corporations profitable, did so at the cost of productivity, quality and availability. I remember, recently having returned from the USA, trying to book a Maruti 800 - only to be laughed at by the salesgirl at the dealership. She asked me to come back after five years when the booking opened again!

But Ambani found ways to beat the system. In a well-documented series of articles by Gurumurthy in The Indian Express, we learnt how Reliance imported a PFY (Polyester Filament Yarn) plant with twice the capacity than declared for customs and licensed capacity. The Bombay Dyeing and Indian Express partnership went to town with this transgression, when the real transgression was how the old firms manipulated the system to limit the capacity of business rivals to systematically bilk the citizen consumer. The public responded by buying more Vimal textiles and buying more Reliance shares.

All this seems so long ago. Do we remember how Bajaj made the same scooter for decades and made a fortune in the process? Do we remember how the lobbyists in New Delhi worked more to thwart additional capacity and competition as if it was the national enemy? This was the system Ambani took on and exposed as mere hollow hypocrisy, which is why few took the exposes of Shourie and Gurumurthy seriously. The public apparently had a superior perception of what the truth actually was than those professing to be concerned with the truth!

The Ambani saga was still beginning. When Ramnath Goenka could not turn Rajiv Gandhi into an instrument of his will to beat Reliance down, he turned upon him with a vengeance. Goenka, Gurumurthy and Shourie hatched a plan to get President Zail Singh to sack Rajiv Gandhi. As things turned out, thanks to the exertions of people like Amitabh Bachchan, Rajiv Gandhi also fell out with VP Singh. Amitabh’s business interests had him re-exporting banned items from the West to the erstwhile Soviet Union, and also claiming generous export incentives. This brought him under the scanner of the Finance Ministry. VP Singh was, as usual, unwilling to oblige and get his hands dirty. It’s not with some irony that the very same Amitabh Bachchan is now aligned with Sonia Gandhi’s arch foes. VP Singh was a godsend for the Goenka crowd. As one of them said to me, ‘If he didn’t show we would have had to create one’!

I remember meeting Dhirubhai Ambani, for the first time, on the eve of the election that saw Rajiv Gandhi defeated. He came to the point very quickly. “What will VP Singh do after he becomes Prime Minister?” I replied, “What can he do besides having a few cases filed?” I was rather surprised that Ambani was concerned about the ability of even a Prime Minister to harm any individual. What are the courts for? And surely he can get the best lawyers to tie up the process in knots? I said that if VP Singh got obsessed with fixing him then he too would go the way of Rajiv Gandhi. As things turned out, Gurumurthy and Arun Jaitly, both hardcore RSS men, got VP Singh enmeshed in their vendetta. Because the truth concerned them.

Soon, it was the old Wadia-Ambani war again. Both, Gurumurthy and Jaitly were thick as thieves with Wadia and now felt emboldened, thinking they had a Prime Minister in their ranks. Ironically, for a man who is Jinnah’s grandson, Wadia has extremely close links with the RSS. Nanaji Deshmukh was his original mentor. He is also close to LK Advani.

The Narasimha Rao years and the advent of delicensing saw Reliance grow many times over. By the time the Vajpayee government came to office, Reliance’s annual profit exceeded Bombay Dyeing’s turnover. After all, there are limits to what good advertising can do for you? But this saga did not end here. With Advani as home minister, the old Wadia lobby around him got busy again. I remember the tussle between South Block and North Block on raiding Reliance and Dhirubhai Ambani. The prime minister did not want the raid. The home minister was insistent. The PM even called up the director of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to back off, but the home minister prevailed. Ambani was raided. Naturally, nothing came of it. The Reliance growth saga continued. Even Arun Shourie was forced to comment that what India needed was a hundred Dhirubhai Ambanis.

Towards the end of 1998, the Government of India was contemplating a new board of directors for the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). The finance minister entrusted me with the task of putting together a list of names. I had Dhirubhai Ambani high up on that list. The list was sent off to the prime minister’s office (PMO). That night I got a call from Dhirubhai. He thanked me for including his name but said I would not succeed. As it happened, the list never got approved or rejected. The PMO was not willing to have Ambani, nor was it willing to reject him. Eventually, the RBI board was only reconstituted after Ambani died.

There is no other story in India comparable with Ambani’s. The only close parallel, internationally, would be the saga of Konusuke Matsushita who built the greatest consumer electronics business the world has known, and made brands like National, Pioneer and JVC household names world over. Matsushita emerged from the debris of post-war Japan and was driven by an ambition to make Japan great once again. Nothing was allowed to stand in his way. He either took over the competition or ran it into the ground. So much so that USA, till today, does not have any noteworthy manufacturer of consumer electronics and has only a token presence in domestic appliances. When Matsushita died, Presidents and Prime Ministers vied to be at his funeral, which was broadcast live to the world. Likewise, when Ambani died, every political leader and captain of industry stood in line with common people to pay homage to him at Seawind on Bombay’s Cuffe Parade. LK Advani cut short his visit to Gujarat and also stood in that line. Dhirubhai Ambani would have chuckled over this and said, ‘Why not?’