- Lived:
- 28 December 1932, Chorwad, Junagadh State (Gujarat) – 6 July 2002, Bombay (Mumbai) · Aden 1949–58, then Bombay for the rest of the life
- Field:
- business — trading, textiles, petrochemicals, refining; founder of Reliance, which became India's largest private company
- The Big Idea:
- An ordinary Indian family's savings could own a piece of Indian industry. He persuaded hundreds of thousands of first-time investors to buy a share certificate — and built, on their money, a polyester-to-petroleum empire — while critics charged, all his life, that he had mastered the system rather than merely beaten it.
- In their words:
- "Think big, think fast, think ahead" — a refrain from his speeches.
- If you remember one thing:
- The man who taught the Indian middle class to own shares is also the man about whom India still argues whether the game was won or fixed — and both halves of that sentence belong to his story.