Birthday love for Dhirubhai Ambani

We know that Dhirubhai Ambani’s 82nd birth anniversary on December 28 was marked by thousands of employees of the Mukesh Ambani-owned Reliance Industries Limited going on one giant movie date. RIL bought 58,000 tickets of the Rajkumar Hirani movie PK for 245 shows in 34 screens across nine multiplexes. But the tribute didn’t end there. A copy of the company newsletter Reliance Herald carries an excerpt from Dhirubhai Ambani: The Man I Knew by Kokilaben D Ambani, revealing Dhirubhai’s student activist days, influenced by Gandhian and socialist ideologies. Along with rare pictures, there’s Kokilaben’s account of how Dhirubhai rebelled against a ban and unfurled the Indian tricolor in Junagadh on August 15, 1947.

There’s also a portrait of the charmer Dhirubhai. When his friends were jailed during the dark days of Partition, Dhirubhai snuck in homemade food to their cells. How? The excerpt reveals that he pulled this off by winning over the guard. Just shows early signs of his powers of persuasion.