My heart bleeds for Anil Ambani. If you’ve read Speaking Tree on this page on Monday, you’ll understand what I mean. A great inheritance has been reduced to metaphysical debate. At 44, Mr Ambani’s is hardly the age for renunciation, even by the puritanical Vedic way of life where brahmacharya gave way to grihastha which, in turn, yielded place to vanaprashtha and ultimately, sanyas. There’s a world to be conquered before embarking on the path of renunciation. For, as Dhirubhai would have said in his lifetime: veer bhogey vasundhara — the brave shall inherit the earth. Anil Ambani is not at the age to give up. Neither is it the age to wonder, as he has, “if science can one day find a cure for greed and unfairness, irrationality and arrogance; whether it can, in the new millennium, offer a pill for overblown egos, as it did for depression and schizophrenia in the old?”
The short answer to that question is that even if it did, Anil Ambani would probably be deprived of a cure. Reliance Lifesciences, after all, has gone to elder brother Mukesh. Now come to think of it, Mr Ambani, it’s fine to quote Lord Krishna in the Gita that “when a man thinks of objects, attachment arises for them, from attachment desire is born. And this desire, also known as maya, gives birth to greed and selfishness, keeping us trapped, like flies in the bottle, in an obsessive web of ownership and possession.” The way to free oneself from that bondage, is to give it all up. Not seek your slice of the pie. The biggest renunciation in last weekend’s family separation among the Ambanis is not Anil’s loss of rights in RIL. It’s Mukesh’s giving up on his telecom business. History has witnessed Mukesh Ambani building Infocomm from scratch, laying 80,000 km of optic fibre lines, hooking up 11 million customers, and building the country’s largest private sector mobile phone network. He did this while Anil went into a sulk in a lonely corner of this big, bad material world.
You don’t need the scriptures to figure out who’s won, and who’s lost. It would do well for Anil Ambani to clean up the mess he accused his elder sibling of leaving behind in Infocomm, now that it’s come his way.
Renunciation can wait.
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