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Authors: Hamish McDonald
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arrested traders had been released, and the complaints against them shelved. Kothary can only guess at Dhirubhai’s intervention.
‘The usual-India!’, he said.
Dhirubhai also emerged as saviour of the market when an even greater supply crisis occurred in 1967, Kothary recalled. On a report that ‘actual user’ import licences had been traded and misused, the Customs authorities in Bombay under the then Assistant Collector, a Mr Ramchandani, impounded all incoming cargoes of artificial fibres. The government insisted that whoever imported the yarn had to be the manufacturer who wove it into cloth.
According to Kothary, about 40 million rupees (then about US$5.3 million) worth of yarn was seized. Many traders then defaulted on loans taken out to cover the imports. The entire artificial textile market was paralysed. ‘It could have made us all insolvent,’ Kothary said. ‘This is when I came very closely in touch with Dhirubhai. It was he who saved us all. We fought for about six months. I used to go with him to lawyers day in and day out. We went to Delhi to see Morarji Desai [then finance minister]. That was the time I could see he was a wizard. He used all the ways and means.’
The crisis ended as quickly as it started, ostensibly after a one-day hearing of the importers’ appeal in the Customs, Excise and Gold Appellate Tribunal under Justice Oberoi, who found for the appeal. Kothary indicates that an agreement engineered by Dhirubhai was behind the judicial settlement. The details are not revealed, but presumably come under the category of ‘That’s India!’ also.
On their move to Bombay, Dhirubbal and his young family had moved into an apartment on the 3rd floor of the Jal Hind Society building in Bhuleshwar, a very crowded district of shops, markets and residential tenements in the central part of the city. The building is what is known as a chawl in Bombay: numerous small apartments, often just single rooms, opening on to open galleries around a central courtyard which is set back from the street behind commercial premises. Quite often the toilets and washing facilities are shared at ground level.
Later accounts of Dhirubhai’s early career often paint this home as Dickensian in the extreme. The flat, since bought by a later tenant, had two small bedrooms, a living room, kitchen and internal bathroom in 1995. Vakharia, who used to visit the Ainbanis for a holiday each Christmas from 1959 to the late 1960s, remembers it being ‘quite luxurious’ compared to the single rooms many Gujarati families had to occupy in Bombay at that time.
Even so, Dhirubhai and his young family, eventually two boys and two girls, lived austerely in surroundings that were crowded, noisy and dirty. The two sons, Mukesh and Anil, who took over day-to-day management of Reliance in the late 1980s, may have had engineering degrees and MBAs from American universities, but their lean early years gave them a hungry ambition unusual in the second generation of a successful Indian business family
As his confidence grew in his Bombay success, Dhirubhai developed his taste for ‘letting loose a scorpion’ through practical jokes and whimsy. Vakharia recalls that when he visited Bombay with his new wife for the first time in 1959, he and Dhirubhai were invited home by their senior mentor Mathura Das Mehta. Mehta’s wife served the young men mango juice, and kept insisting on refilling their glasses. ‘Dhirubhai whispered:
“Let’s do some mischief,”’ Vakharia said. The two asked for a fourth glass, and kept then accepting more. After more than a dozen glasses each, the Mehta kitchen ran out of mangoes and a servant had to be sent to the market to buy more, which were all duly consumed. The Mehtas continued to be friends, ‘but they never invited us back for any lunch or dinner at their house’, Vakharia said.
Each year, Dhirubhai would make it a point to play an April Fool’s joke upon an elderly employee named
‘The usual-India!’, he said.
Dhirubhai also emerged as saviour of the market when an even greater supply crisis occurred in 1967, Kothary recalled. On a report that ‘actual user’ import licences had been traded and misused, the Customs authorities in Bombay under the then Assistant Collector, a Mr Ramchandani, impounded all incoming cargoes of artificial fibres. The government insisted that whoever imported the yarn had to be the manufacturer who wove it into cloth.
According to Kothary, about 40 million rupees (then about US$5.3 million) worth of yarn was seized. Many traders then defaulted on loans taken out to cover the imports. The entire artificial textile market was paralysed. ‘It could have made us all insolvent,’ Kothary said. ‘This is when I came very closely in touch with Dhirubhai. It was he who saved us all. We fought for about six months. I used to go with him to lawyers day in and day out. We went to Delhi to see Morarji Desai [then finance minister]. That was the time I could see he was a wizard. He used all the ways and means.’
The crisis ended as quickly as it started, ostensibly after a one-day hearing of the importers’ appeal in the Customs, Excise and Gold Appellate Tribunal under Justice Oberoi, who found for the appeal. Kothary indicates that an agreement engineered by Dhirubhai was behind the judicial settlement. The details are not revealed, but presumably come under the category of ‘That’s India!’ also.
On their move to Bombay, Dhirubbal and his young family had moved into an apartment on the 3rd floor of the Jal Hind Society building in Bhuleshwar, a very crowded district of shops, markets and residential tenements in the central part of the city. The building is what is known as a chawl in Bombay: numerous small apartments, often just single rooms, opening on to open galleries around a central courtyard which is set back from the street behind commercial premises. Quite often the toilets and washing facilities are shared at ground level.
Later accounts of Dhirubhai’s early career often paint this home as Dickensian in the extreme. The flat, since bought by a later tenant, had two small bedrooms, a living room, kitchen and internal bathroom in 1995. Vakharia, who used to visit the Ainbanis for a holiday each Christmas from 1959 to the late 1960s, remembers it being ‘quite luxurious’ compared to the single rooms many Gujarati families had to occupy in Bombay at that time.
Even so, Dhirubhai and his young family, eventually two boys and two girls, lived austerely in surroundings that were crowded, noisy and dirty. The two sons, Mukesh and Anil, who took over day-to-day management of Reliance in the late 1980s, may have had engineering degrees and MBAs from American universities, but their lean early years gave them a hungry ambition unusual in the second generation of a successful Indian business family
As his confidence grew in his Bombay success, Dhirubhai developed his taste for ‘letting loose a scorpion’ through practical jokes and whimsy. Vakharia recalls that when he visited Bombay with his new wife for the first time in 1959, he and Dhirubhai were invited home by their senior mentor Mathura Das Mehta. Mehta’s wife served the young men mango juice, and kept insisting on refilling their glasses. ‘Dhirubhai whispered:
“Let’s do some mischief,”’ Vakharia said. The two asked for a fourth glass, and kept then accepting more. After more than a dozen glasses each, the Mehta kitchen ran out of mangoes and a servant had to be sent to the market to buy more, which were all duly consumed. The Mehtas continued to be friends, ‘but they never invited us back for any lunch or dinner at their house’, Vakharia said.
Each year, Dhirubhai would make it a point to play an April Fool’s joke upon an elderly employee named
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