Vegetarians

"If I have problems perceiving a color I don't know who to go to – an opthamologist, a neurologist, or a computer programmer."

"Life will be much more exciting when we stop creating applications for mobile phones and we start creating applications for our own body."

"Light is slow."

"Beware not to use the future as an excuse to ignore living in the present."

"I don't feel that I'm using technology, I don't feel that I'm wearing technology, I feel that I am technology."

"There are no white skins, and there are no black skins. Humans skins are of different shades of orange."

"We're not earthly beings any more… we're cosmic beings."

"The earth is my altar, the sky is my dome, mind is my garden, the heart is my home and I'm always at home — yea, I'm always at Om."

"What I mean by the Principle of Oneness is this: That we must learn to realize that there's nothing separate or apart. That everything is part of everything else. That there's nothing above us, or below us, or around us. All is inherent within us. Like Jesus said, "The Kingdom is Within.""

"Some white people hate black people, and some white people love black people, some black people hate white people, and some black people love white people. So you see it's not an issue of black and white, it's an issue of Lovers and Haters."

"I am a being of Heaven and Earth, of thunder and lightning, of rain and wind, of the galaxies, of the suns and the stars and the void through which they travel. The essence of nature, eternal, divine that all men seek to know to hear, known as the great illusion time, and the all-prevailing atmosphere. And now you know my background."

"Now Heaven and Earth are older than the temples, and older than the Scriptures, and whether we realize it or not, they hold more authority."

"There was a boy A very strange enchanted boy..."

"While we spoke of many things Fools and kings This he said to me: "The greatest thing you'll ever learn Is just to love and be loved in return.""

"The seasons come and the seasons go, the summer fruit and the winter snow, but here we are, and here we stay — until the time to go away. Ah, they say, there's a land that is great, and is grand; there's no fear, and no pain — we will all live again — and everyone will find the ones they love."

"The most discussed building in Mumbai is probably the twenty –seven- story of Mukesh Ambani India’s wealthiest man and the head of Reliance Industries. Ambani’s personal wealth is estimated at just under $ 25 billion, just about a billion for each floor of his Mumbai home."

"Mukesh took that vision [His father’s vision] to the next level at the beginning of India’s explosive growth in the late 1990s and 2000s and turning his father’s growing conglomerate into India’s largest company, whose taxes alone provide 5percent of all national government revenues."

"Mukesh has to his credit the direction and leading the creation of the world’s largest petroleum refinery at Jamnagar, India with a capacity of 540,000 barrels per day integrated with petrochemicals, power generation, port and related infrastructure at an investment of 25,000 crores."

"Reliance will get listed on wall street because we want to benchmark ourselves with the top 100 companies of the world."

"I dream of India becoming one of four most powerful economies of the world. I believe this dream can be made a reality within our life times."

"a leader is only recognized when he can resolve all differences. My father had the veto power over all decisions and that veto power is mine. But in the last ten years, he never used his veto power. He would say, once you have fired you gun you no longer have the bullet with you...My father’s biggest legacy was his leadership. He used to say, a leader must have followers. Respect can not be demanded . I have to get others to say what I want to say."

"For me, this is a moment of re-dedication to the values, vision and goals of my father, teacher and mentor, Dhirubhai Ambani. To lead by love, by trust, and by example, I learnt these principles from him with humility."

"As my father was privileged to have witnessed in 1947, independence of India from Britain, I was privileged to have seen in 1991 India embracing economic reforms that liberated our country’s entrepreneurial energies. These two transitions set India on the path of development and had a profound on the world both political economic terms."

"The performance of Reliance shows an amazing trend when mapped against time. The inflection point was 1991. We grew exponentially, eventually becoming India’s biggest private enterprise, on the basis of freedom to compete against the best in the world."

"Mukesh is the hands-on manufacturing and operations man"

"I believe India today is potentially poised for another even more stupendous leap on its upward trajectory. India’s relative weight in the global economy and in world affairs in general, is bound to grow for many reasons. By 2030, India is projected to overtake China as the most populous country in the world, with the third largest economy in US dollar terms. Furthermore India is a very young nation with nearly two thirds of its population below the age of thirty-five."

"I am very bullish on India because it is really the aspiration of a billion people and ours is a county where all the billion count. There are some countries in the world where one person counts, there are some where the Politburo or 12 people count."

"The Treaty of India is that all our billion people count and they have aspirations."

"People first want to spend money on food -- that is common across the world. The second, in India, is education. In many parts of the world, it comes way down the list of priorities. So, there is a huge opportunity."

"We have not invested well in marketing ourselves. It is partly because of my trait. I believe that if my conviction is right, I will not need to go and explain myself to anyone. I believed that ultimately everyone will figure out what you are. We are changing this approach."

"India's story is a "really a bottom-up" one and not the other-way round. We are on long-term growth trajectory and this is just not growth in terms of GDP numbers, this is really for well being of each and every Indian and that's the aspiration."

"Mukesh cut his teeth at the group’s Patalganga plant immediately after his stint at Stanford."

"I think that China is maintaining steady growth, it is not decelerating. Europe has found its own transition path and they will transgress through the financial system in an orderly way and it is my expectation. India has had some slow growth. But, I am very optimistic on India,"

"But this doesn't work without a scheme. If you ask me to build a power plant, I cannot give that power at 3 cents or 4 cents, unless I put up a 2000 MW project. It's the same for an airport, seaport and all the other stuff. You need to spread costs over a sensible size to keep unit costs low."

"From a million people, it will benefit 10 million people. If that is what has happened in software, imagine what will happen in agriculture."

"The food market is much bigger than the software services market. And the money goes straight into the hands of millions of farmers. The spinoffs are enormous -- jobs, houses, durables, a whole new consumption boom will start in rural areas."

"The most employment-intensive industry in the world is retail and our next generation needs these jobs. India has a strategy for the next generation of doctors, engineers and biotech graduates, etc. But for the country as a whole, what we need to resolve is how to create sensible jobs for undergraduates and or those even less educated"

"We all know India has a huge competitive advantage -- we have the largest arable land, focused sunshine, sensible utilisation of water in 30% of land. The question is what should we do to make the US market -- the most difficult market in the world -- accept our produce. For that, we need traceability. It is a simple technology, which we are giving the farmers. It needs certification and verification processes -- to us it is like a process plant. You can then get the output, sort it and grade it."

"We got into telecom in the '90s by bidding for cellular licences. But I felt that the real value is in the convergence of information and communication; pure communication will not deliver a sustainable value; that is why we called ourselves infocomm. It was learning a whole new domain. We brought in experts from the outside but we essentially did it with proven Reliance people."

"Then, we stumbled on human and plant biotech. We were fortunate to have some good people and decided that Reliance can build this business over 5-10 years without any great revenue pressures. In the mainstream business, there was telecom or what I call infocomm."

"The US and Europe saw large players in foods by the '50s and '60s; but in India, food has always been a disorganised, fragmented value chain. We believe that India's purchasing power will be food-dominated. The first thing we need is safe to eat food that will, in turn, meet many other needs."

"We are working at putting the most modern technology in farms at Indian costs. I always say whatever the US implements in dollars we should be able to do it at exchange rate of Rs 10, then we would be globally competitive."

"We only have a superficial knowledge about the true rural India -- the power structure, how to operate in tehsils, what are their true concerns, etc. But we think we can significantly change purchasing power and how we live. That's what motivates us"

"My reference points were US companies. We were hugely influenced by large US chemical companies, especially DuPont. It was a very open company and we could take advantage of their learnings. The US is also a very open society. I could to go the US Association of Chemical Engineers and get the standards, data, etc."

"I was very focussed on building various competencies in Reliance and we were not ready to do two things at the same time. It was a big risk for us to get into IT, especially because it was hugely effort-intensive. In my language, I said we have too much soap on our body and we need to take a bath in the chemicals business."

"We got into life sciences as a defence mechanism in the late '90s"

"We offer to protect their savings in a job here. If you earn $100,000 a year there, you also spend $80,000 and save $15,000-$20,000. We say, if you work for us in India, we will ensure you save $15,000 dollars a year and are part of something exciting without a loss to you."

"Mukesh Ambani joined reliance in 1981 and imitated Reliance’s backward integration from textiles in to polyester fibres and further into petrochemicals."

"One of my biggest obsessions today is that senior people must give bright 25-year olds the opportunity to contribute meaningfully."

"My first memories are of the early '60s at mount road which was then an emerging area. We were a close-knit family and the four of us -- Dipti, Nina, Anil and I -- were left to do what we wanted. There were boundaries, of course, but within those, we were not micro-managed. Things have changed so much now. When my kids, Isha and Akash, were in the third standard, we behaved as though it was our exam."