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| Bollywood remakes Indian rags-to-riches story | | | BL KAK
NEW DELHI, JAN. 11
Dhirubhai Ambani is India's best-known rags-to-riches billionaire, but the makers of a new Bollywood film about a villager who rises to the pinnacle of the corporate world insist the movie is not about him. "Gurubhai", the name of the lead character in "Guru", rhymes uncannily with the name of the deceased founder of the Reliance group, and both men come from a poor village.
On their journey to the top, both founded their companies in 1958 in India's financial hub of Mumbai and displayed a penchant for getting things done without taking a 'no' for an answer. One of the promo lines of the film reads: "Think big. Think ahead. Think fast", which matches word-for-word the corporate motto of Ambani.
But the film's director, Mani Ratnam, told reporters that "Guru", which opens on Friday (Jan. 12), was largely fictional. "It is about the journey of a man at a point of time in India who is trying to reach where he wants to reach," Ratnam said.
The hero in "Guru" is the son of a school teacher who travels from a village in the western State of Gujarat to Mumbai and, after much struggle, breaks into the Indian corporate world which until then remained an exclusive, elitist club of bluebloods. That is also the story of Ambani. The third of five children of a poor school teacher, Ambani left home when he was 17 to join his eldest brother in Yemen, where he worked as a petrol station attendant, and later as a clerk for an affiliate of Burmah Shell, all the while dreaming of one day owning an oil company.
He achieved that and more. Ambani created an industrial empire that includes Reliance Petroleum, which operates the fifth-largest refinery in the world, and Reliance Industries, a synthetic fibre and petrochemical manufacturer. Reliance's remarkable growth also prompted accusations that Ambani's success owed as much to manipulation of government policy as to shrewd business decisions. Ambani - who died in 2002 leaving a conglomerate with a market value of 9 billion dollars- attributed the criticism to his lowly beginnings.
In "Guru", the protagonist shrugs off similar accusations of immorality and manipulation with a quip: "If people say bad things about you, you must be doing something good." "Guru" stars Bollywood's macho lover Abhishek Bachchan, who says he had to put on a few pounds to develop a paunch, quite like the barrel-chested business baron looked.
Bollywood beauty Aishwarya Rai, a former Miss World, who is reportedly Bachchan's fiance, plays Guru's docile village wife.
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