The formative years of Dhirubhai Ambani, India’s entrepreneur extraordinaire

Ambani passed away in July 2002, leaving behind a giant conglomerate whose market capitalization today exceeds $250 billion and a legacy that continues to shape Indian business.

While the details of his professional life are household lore now, repeated across newspapers, magazines, and films, it’s his early life, vividly captured in Dhirubhai Ambani: The Man I Knew by Kokilaben, that provides fascinating clues to his career. Restless, rule-bending, fear-defying, Ambani was a force of nature who saw opportunity where others saw limits.

As a seven-year-old boy, he spent a moonless night alone in a cremation ground to prove that fear was just a phantom in the mind. It would be a lifelong pattern of behaviour. Anything that seemed like a hurdle to most men had to be conquered. From the sun-baked village of Chorwad in Gujarat, where he was born, he forged the mindset that would dismantle bureaucratic barriers, democratize stock ownership, and prove that audacity could triumph over pedigree.

Born on 28 December 1932 to a schoolteacher father of modest means and a homemaker mother, Jamnaben, young Dhirubhai's circumstances spelt limitations. Two sets of clothes, ironed overnight under his mattress, were all he had to wear to school. Each dawn, he'd trek three kilometres through the blistering heat to the nearby village of Kukkaswada to fetch buttermilk for the family.

His first taste of margin and market timing came from buying mangoes en route to sell later at a profit. When school canteen portions disappointed, he didn't merely complain; he rallied classmates, pitched the headmaster with persuasive logic, and secured the contract himself.

These weren't just childhood escapades; they revealed an entrepreneurial mindset that prioritized opportunity over available resources. With minimal capital as a pre-teen, he bought wholesale oil and retailed it, sharing profits dutifully with his mother. While resources were fungible, his vision remained constant. When he saw foreign cars in the streets of Mumbai, he didn't stare wistfully but declared with certainty, he would ride them someday. This unshakeable self-belief would become his signature trait.

India's freedom movement amplified his boldness. He scrawled patriotic slogans on Junagadh's walls pre-dawn, defying the Nawab's ban, and unfurled the tricolour on 15 August 1947. Taking risks was becoming second nature.

By 1948, matriculation barely in hand, he gave up college for a clerk's job at A. Besse & Co.'s Aden petrol station, where he learned key business skills, including trading, accounting, and documentation. He also read copiously and observed keenly, picking up tips on commodity trading, currency trading, and crucially, money management. Following his marriage to Kokilaben in 1955, he returned to India in 1958 with small savings and an expanding mental map of international commerce and opportunity.

His daughter Dipti once asked him for his success secret. “Guts and luck,” he replied. The guts were plainly visible—even a 1986 stroke that paralyzed his right hand couldn't stop him from blueprinting the world's largest grassroots refinery at Jamnagar. The luck bit is debatable. Did he make his own luck? Perhaps it was what Nassim Taleb calls “antifragility”, the capacity to gain from disorder and volatility.

Dhirubhai Ambani died in 2002, but his influence on Indian business endures. Scale, vertical integration, shareholder loyalty, and the belief that business begins at home are all his legacies. But his biggest contribution to Indian entrepreneurship may be the most intangible: the notion that extraordinary vision can emerge from the most ordinary circumstances, and that the only real limits are the ones we accept in our minds.