DHIRUBHAI AMBANI – THE MAN I KNEW

Behind every successful man, so goes the saying, there is usually a woman. In the life of the legendary Dhirubhai Ambani, that woman was his wife, Kokilaben. She was his fount of inspiration and support in a life that began in extremely trying and modest circumstances but blossomed into the greatest ever success story in the annals of Indian industry. In a moving personal memoir, Kokilaben pays tribute to her husband. Having lived and learned with Dhirubhai for close to half a century, Kokilaben is uniquely placed to tell the story of his life and his meteoric rise in business as well as personal life. The memoirs have been simultaneously published in English and Gujarati. While the English version is titled Dhirubhai Ambani – The Man I Knew, the Gujarati edition is named “DHIRUBHAI AMBANI – MAARA JEEVAN SATHI”. Here, in her own words, Kokilaben describes her life with Dhirubhai and her belief in a man who was born to be a legend in his own lifetime. The memoirs depict the remarkable life of Dhirubhai Ambani in all its richness, beginning with his childhood in the village of Chorwad to his early youth in the 1950s as a migrant worker in Aden, then a British Colony, to his later years as one of India’s great industrial visionaries. Kokilaben has long cherished the desire to compile a book on Dhirubhai based on her personal memories. This dream has now seen the light of day. Helped and assisted by daughter Dipti (Ambani) Salgaocar, who worked with her mother in conceptualizing and putting together this immense labour of love, the book reveals Dhirubhai not just as an industrialist par excellence but also as an extra– ordinary human being. The book contains over 300 pages, comprising rare pictures of places and people associated with Dhirubhai as well as inspiring and intimate personal anecdotes of his life and work.