Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Most of Hamish McDonald’s awesome book, Ambani & Sons , is about Dhirubhai. One thing I realized from the book is that the backdrop to how things were in India back then cannot be separated from Dhirubhai’s actions. Thus: “Dhirubhai had learnt that relationships were the key to unlocking help and that the law could be argued with.” If connections were king, this attribute probably helped him immensely: “Dhirubhai was endowed with a photographic memory for faces and names, and he would try to turn any contact – however fleeting – into a common background on which some affection could be based.” So good was Dhirubhai at this that Arun Shorie wrote (decades later): “He had sources in places where mere journalists like me do not even know there are places.”   It was a time when, as McDonald writes: “A lot of grovelling indeed was required for businessmen to get the clearances they needed.” And Dhirubhai was willing to do whatever was needed: “I am willing to sal...

When a precious metal is used as currency (gold, silver), it creates a weird situation. The metal itself has a price (aka the price of gold or silver), which can fluctuate over time. But the value of the coin made from that same metal remains fixed: 10 rupees, 50 cents, whatever. Inevitably, there are periods where the price of the metal is higher than the value of the coin. When that happens, the following action is profitable: Melt the coin to get the metal. Then sell that melted metal for its market price. Put simply, melt a 10 rupee coin and get say, 11 rupees for the melted metal.   This has always been a problem with all metal-based currencies throughout history. But I didn’t realize it even happened in the 1950’s. Yemen found that its currency, the Rial, that was made of silver, was “disappearing from circulation”. Officials traced the disappearing coins to Aden, then a British colony. Even more specifically, the open orders to get as many Rials as possible came from a...