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18 September 2006 -
News Updates India's
Mr. Big – Mr Mukesh Ambani Mukesh Ambani has been India's Mr. Big for a long time. By all accounts, he is the country's most influential private citizen, and the businessman who thinks bigger than the rest in this rising economic superpower. He was all that even before a bitter internal feud led to a split in his family conglomerate. The breakup, finalized in January, left Ambani in control of the larger (and largely petrochemical) share, Reliance Industries, and that behemoth has seen its fortunes soar ever since. It is now India's largest private-sector enterprise by any measure: revenue ($20 billion in 2005), profit ($2 billion) or share of Indian GDP (3.5 percent). Its stock has shot up dramatically since January, rising 62 percent to make Reliance India's biggest company by market cap (about $41.5 billion). Ambani, who was already the world's 38th richest person before the split, according to Forbes, is now considerably richer. He says that while most family empires destroy wealth when they divide, the parting of the Ambanis was a "win-win" proposition. Now Mr. Big's ambitions are bigger than ever. Since the breakup, Ambani, 49, has finalized plans to invest more than $11 billion over the next decade to build two new satellite cities outside creaking, overcrowded Mumbai and Delhi. He foresees these metropolises emerging within just four years, each with a population of 5 million people making $5,000 a year on average (seven times India's norm), and hosting top multinational companies. And that is all pretty simple—a development on steroids—compared with the idea that really gets him going. Ambani's favorite scheme aims to revolutionize in one swoop two of India's largest sectors: farming and retail. Despite boom times, India is still a nation where 100 million mostly small farmers work with ox and plow, where 96 percent of retail stores are mom-and-pop shops and most of the roads between farm and store are mud tracks. Ambani plans to invest $5 billion by 2011 to modernize both farms and retail, connecting upgraded fields through the latest logistics technology to a cutting-edge network of stores—or what he calls a "Wal-Mart in India." In the process, he aims to create enough of a surplus to generate $20 billion in agricultural exports annually. In China, plans this grand would be hatched by the Communist Party. In India, the government is neither visionary nor efficient enough. But Mukesh Ambani is both. "This new business model excites me the most," said Ambani, wearing a white polyester-blend, safari-style shirt and dark blue slacks, in an interview in his Mumbai office recently. Ambani is an extreme example of the explosion in an entrepreneurial energy India has seen every time it opens a new industry to competition. The Reliance conglomerate got its start as a family textile business in 1966 and has grown in spurts, often triggered when the government released its grip on one sector or another. Mukesh Ambani's new cities were born, for example, from a recent reversal in the attitude of both state and federal governments, which are now willing to give private businessmen control over huge projects. "Can you imagine the change in mind-set?" he says. "The government is ceding its powers." What distinguishes Ambani is the sweep of his plans, and his track record. "His genius, his strength, is that he's enormously good at executing large projects," says Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys, India's huge IT company. "He is able to assemble large numbers of people, the project-management skills, the capital, and then execute." Ambani wants to build a chain of both small and supersize stores across India, creating 1 million jobs and reaching $25 billion in annual sales. If his plan succeeds, he says, consumers will get fresher food at lower prices, rural incomes will soar and farmers will become active consumers. The agricultural-export boom will bring India's farmers into the global economy, as IT has done for its college grads. "We are rebalancing the world," says Ambani. "We are, in fact, lucky to be at the right place at the right time, contributing to our self-confidence as Indians. That's what energizes me." It's a vision in which everyone wins, which helps explain the silence of any doubters. They were not so silent earlier. Mukesh Ambani got his start implementing the dreams of his father, Dhirubhai, who founded Reliance. In 1980 Dhirubhai summoned Mukesh back from his M.B.A. studies at Stanford to begin a risky attempt at "backward integration" of the company's textile mills. The plan was to move from sewing clothes to creating the fabric, and eventually refining and pumping the oil from which synthetic fabrics are made. At almost every step, naysayers would dismiss Ambani's plans as too grand for the Indian market. Mukesh first took charge of building a polyester plant at Patalganga, and then a huge petrochemical plant to feed the Patalganga complex. "The son learned at his father's feet how to think big," says Vallabh Bhanshali, a Mumbai investment banker. By 1996, the Ambanis were launching the next step in their grand plan: an oil refinery. Mukesh lived in a shipping container at the arid site in Jamnagar, 850 kilometers northwest of Mumbai on the Gulf of Kutch, while managing a work force of 80,000 and finishing in just three years. Soon after the plant came online in 2000, India started exporting refined petroleum, becoming a net energy exporter for the first time. While other nations like Angola and Turkmenistan have achieved a similar turnaround, they did it by simply exploiting existing oil reserves—not by creating an industry, as Ambani did for India. Mukesh says he is driven by a favorite phrase of his father's: "To create something out of nothing." Mukesh pushed ahead, taking advantage of the deregulation of the telecom sector in 2003 to launch Reliance Infocomm, now the third largest telecom in India, and realized another dream of his father's: cutting the price of a phone call down to a penny a minute in India. To transform Indian farmers into quality suppliers for his new retail chain, Ambani plans to create 1,600 farm-supply hubs across India, providing technical know-how and credit, selling seeds, fertilizer and fuel, and buying produce. He also plans to build some 85 logistics centers and to train tens of thousands of new employees by early 2007 to do everything from erecting prefab warehouses to transporting fresh produce. "There will be mistakes," he admits. "But we are not scared. We will correct our mistakes fast and move on." Ambani's basic bet is on the future of the Indian market of 1 billion consumers. This is virgin territory, in which the 96 percent share held by family-run shops is high even compared with China (80 percent). That makes it a relatively easy market to conquer, and Ambani predicts retail sales will surpass refining as Reliance's main source of revenue. In a sign of confidence, he has urged the government to remain true to its free-market reforms by not trying to block the real Wal-Mart from entering India. Ambani thinks he can beat the American giant on his home turf based in part on superior local knowledge. Reliance executives understand, for example, the political power of small retailers, and are moving to incorporate them into the chain. A trial partnership with the Sahakari Bhandar chain has already transformed this string of 19 supermarkets in Mumbai. Since May, Reliance has renovated and computerized these stores, tripling revenues and customer traffic. Ambani next plans to build new superstores on the outskirts of small cities before expanding into the big ones. Many obstacles are melting in Ambani's path. Last year, Parliament created special economic zones that grant developers greater freedom than they enjoy even in China's zones, on which Ambani's new cities are modeled. The government is a small and largely silent partner in these projects, and Reliance plans to build just about everything, from roads and rail links to power and water supplies. There will be a one-stop licensing agency, jointly run by Reliance and the government, to cut through India's infamous red tape. Can it be done by 2010? "If anyone can do it, Reliance can," says Sanjay Nayar, the CEO of Citigroup in India. After all, the bigger and faster, the better.
Wonders of Sikh Spirituality Come Alive Sikhism, the world’s fifth-largest organized religion, has more than 20 million followers. Many thousands live in New York City. We can spot Sikh men on the street by their turbans and upswept whiskers. But what about Sikhism itself? Few Westerners have even basic information. How many people are aware that it was conceived as a universalist, open-door religion? Or that its view of society was radically egalitarian? Or that its holy book, the Adi Granth, far from being a catalog of sectarian dos and don’ts, is a bouquet of poetic songs, blending the fragrances of Hindu ragas, Muslim hymns and Punjabi folk tunes into a music of spiritual astonishment? This is precisely the information delivered by the small and absolutely beautiful show titled “I See No Stranger: Early Sikh Art and Devotion” at the Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea. Vivid but concentrated, it presents, mostly through paintings, a culture’s version of its own origins, the image of history shaped far more by hard work, pluralistic politics and mysticism than by militancy. Sikhism was founded at the end of the 15th century in northern India, when a young, high-caste Punjabi Hindu named Nanak had a revelation. It led him to believe that God was a formless spiritual force shared by all religions, and that social ranks based on faith, class, caste, gender or race were illusory. Unity was reality. The Other was just another. “I see no stranger, I see no enemy, I look upon all with good will,” is how Sikh scripture phrases it. Eager to share his vision, Nanak took to the road, accompanied by a Muslim musician named Mardana, who played the stringed instrument called a rabab. Together they traveled, according to official accounts of Nanak’s life, from Sri Lanka to Afghanistan, and west to Baghdad and Mecca, composing and singing devotional songs as they went. They lived at a high devotional moment. The mystical brand of Islam called Sufism was in full flower, as was the corresponding Hindu movement call Bhakti. Saints of all sorts and sects wandered northern India, bumping into and bouncing off one another, turning a subcontinent into a kind of giant love-in. Orthodox thinking was turned inside out. Hierarchies were up-ended. Students taught and teachers learned. The name Sikh — pronounced sick with an enunciated H at the end — comes from a Sanskrit word for disciple. The exhibition, organized by the art historian B. N. Goswamy of Panjab University, and Caron Smith, chief curator of the Rubin Museum, conveys something of the flavor of all this through dozens of miniature paintings in Hindu and Mughal court styles illustrating the life of Nanak, or Guru Nanak as he came to be called. In them he emerges as a figure of commonsensical wit, unassuming piety, superhuman power and increasing physical bulk. He’s a trim, soft-faced schoolboy in one 18th-century painting, standing in class and holding out a writing board — it looks like a boxy camera — to a teacher. Already by this time Nanak has been lecturing his parents on the Bhagavad-Gita and writing metaphysical verse. Some of these poems, we are meant to assume, are on the writing board. And we know his confounded teacher will give him an A for Amazing. Another picture shows the adult Nanak asleep on the floor of a mosque in Mecca, with his feet pointed, in a scandalous breach of religious etiquette, toward the Kaaba, God’s house, the holy of holies. When an outraged mullah tries to drag him around into reverse position, the Kaaba turns too. The lesson: no direction is unhallowed, because God is everywhere. In a third painting, Nanak, now in stout middle age and wearing a sort of zany aviator’s cap, sits with his book of hymns under a tree. Mardana, tuning up nearby, stares blankly off into space. From the left a princely figure, stiff-backed and poker-faced, approaches on horseback to pay homage. Clearly the meeting is a significant one, but nobody seems very into it, or even aware that anyone else is there. |
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