By Shatakshi Bhargava

This profile was written in August 2018 during the author's Modlingua internship.

"Our dreams have to be bigger. Our ambitions higher, our commitment deeper, and our efforts greater." This popular quote belongs to D. Hirachand Ambani - Dhirubhai Ambani - one of the most successful entrepreneurs India has produced. He founded Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), today ranked among the world's top 500 companies by revenue. His journey from poverty to billionaire remains one of the most inspiring stories for the youth of the nation.

Early life

Dhirubhai was born on 28 December 1932 in Chorwad village, Junagadh district, Gujarat, to Hirachand Govardhandas Ambani, a school teacher, and Jamnaben, a homemaker. He had four siblings: Trilochanben, Ramnikbhai, Jasuben and Nathubhai. He had little interest in formal education and believed that studies and money had no direct link - that it was possible to make money even without studying. He left school early and started selling pakoras to pilgrims on Mount Girnar over the weekends to help his family.

At 16, with his family's finances strained and his father's health failing, Dhirubhai went to Aden with his brother Ramnikbhai's help. He first worked at a petrol pump and soon became a clerk at A. Besse & Co., one of the biggest trading firms in the region. Hardworking and sharp, he took on many part-time jobs alongside, earning as much as he could, because he knew that real money required a business of his own. At Besse & Co. he learned commodity trading, imports and exports, wholesale merchandising, marketing, sales and distribution, and he picked up currency trading from people of many nationalities. He was later sent by his employer to work at the Shell oil refinery in Aden - where he began to dream of owning a refinery himself one day.

Back to India: the birth of Reliance

In 1954, Dhirubhai married Kokilaben; the couple had two sons, Mukesh and Anil, and two daughters, Nina and Deepti. After returning to India, he started the Reliance Commercial Corporation in partnership with his second cousin, Champaklal Damani. Their office was a small room on Narsinatha Street with one telephone, one table, three chairs and two assistants. The partnership eventually ended - the two men had different views on how to conduct business: Damani was a cautious trader, Dhirubhai a risk taker. As he believed, "True entrepreneurship comes only from risk taking."

Sensing an opportunity in textiles, Ambani secured the clearances to manufacture cloth from polyester fibre. Polyester was new to India, and people soon realised it was better than cotton in quality and far cheaper. The company grew quickly. Setting up his first textile mill at Naroda, Ahmedabad, was one of the biggest hurdles of his life, but the brand he created - Vimal - flourished and remains a household name in India. Reliance grew from a turnover of about 70 crore rupees in the mid-1970s to some 75,000 crore by 2002.

The middle-class investor

At a time when India's capital markets were largely limited to a small, influential elite, Dhirubhai convinced some 58,000 middle-class investors, mostly from small towns, to back his promise of a substantial return - a promise he kept until his last days. The company later moved into energy, power, infrastructure, services, retail, capital markets, telecommunications, logistics and information technology, and in the 1990s he turned aggressively towards petrochemicals, oil refining, telecom and financial services.

Later years and legacy

Dhirubhai died on 6 July 2002 after a stroke. His sons took over: Mukesh Ambani, the elder, became chairman, managing director and largest shareholder of Reliance Industries Ltd, dealing mainly in refining, petrochemicals, and oil and gas; Anil Ambani became chairman of the Reliance Group, leading listed companies including Reliance Capital, Reliance Infrastructure, Reliance Power and Reliance Communications.

He received many honours. FICCI named him "Entrepreneur of the 20th Century" in March 2000. In October 2011 he was posthumously given the Global Asian Award at the Asian Business Leadership Forum Awards, and in January 2016 he was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, India's second-highest civilian honour.

His journey from a pakora seller to the founder of one of the world's most successful companies is deeply inspiring. Despite poor financial conditions, he never gave up and never stopped learning. When his partnership with his cousin broke, he never looked back. He understood what would sell in India and worked relentlessly towards it. He is remembered as the man who wrote Indian corporate history and built a truly global corporate group by chasing his own dream - he could do it all because he could dream, and dream big.

Sayings widely attributed to Dhirubhai Ambani

• "If you don't build your dream, someone else will hire you to help them build theirs."
• "Think big, think fast, think ahead. Ideas are no one's monopoly."
• "You do not require an invitation to make profits."
• "Pursue your goals even in the face of difficulties, and convert adversities into opportunities."
• "Meeting the deadlines is not good enough; beating the deadlines is my expectation."
• "Only when you dream it, you can do it."
• "Challenge negative forces with hope, self-confidence and conviction. I believe that ambition and initiative will ultimately triumph."
• "Between my past, the present and the future, there is one common factor: relationship and trust. This is the foundation of our growth."
• "If you work with determination and with perfection, success will follow."
• "True entrepreneurship comes only from risk-taking."