One thought it happened only in the movies. In Aks, for instance, the protagonist and the villain swap personas after a fight -- the good Amitabh Bachchan becomes dark and the bad Manoj Bajpai becomes the good cop -- and confusion ensues
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One thought it happened only in the movies. In Aks, for instance, the protagonist and the villain swap personas after a fight -- the good Amitabh Bachchan becomes dark and the bad Manoj Bajpai becomes the good cop -- and confusion ensues.
In real life, Mumbai's most famous brothers seem to have exchanged personas, and it can be traced to another catastrophic falling out in June 2005.
Anil, the admittedly flashier, extroverted man who married a filmstar and was spotted with the jet setting filmstars, high-profile politicians and industrialists, seems to have become reclusive, while his elder brother Mukesh, once the low-profile mover and shaker, has discovered the rockstar within, buying IPL teams and homes that overwhelmed columnists variously describe as the new Taj Mahal and the castle of kitsch.
It is difficult to recollect anything about Mukesh Ambani before 2005 that suggested he would some day be a person who would be discussed as a great show-off, the mascot of a newly powerful and prosperous India flaunting its global might, especially the foreign media . One of the only engaging anecdotes I've heard about him is a young Mukesh causing a small traffic jam when he stopped his car to propose to the woman he later married. Now, that is folklore, and folklore is not always true. Even if it is true, it just points to a determined man who does not take no for an answer, rather than an attention-seeker bent on holding up motorists.
A member of Mukesh Ambani's public relations team had once told me: "Mukesh-bhai has a very simple instruction for his publicity team: 'Keep me out of publicity. Keep me out of the papers.'"
So, what really happened? Why did he decide to dispatch an unwritten invitation for flash cameras to up their wattage around his life? Or why does Anil Ambani, whose day used to start with a swarm of cameras trailing him as he ran on Marine Drive like Leonardo DiCaprio on Sunset Strip, hardly court media attention or give an interview nowadays? There is considerable talk in Delhi that the Anil Ambani camp is behind the Niira Radia tape leaks. Those close to him deny leaking the conversations to the media and say the leaks have, in fact, potential to damage some of Anil's interests. Whether that is true or not, the point is that once Mukesh would be associated with such backroom manoeuvres more than his brother.
It is difficult to get the real story behind the mysterious swapping of persona. It could be image doctors deciding to give their clients' personalities cosmetic surgeries that make them unrecognisable, unpredictable. It could be the wives, and wives are widely known to produce profound changes in the personality of their spouses.
It could also be an eerie, simultaneous introspection by the two brothers which has made them mirror each other while in battle. Some day, psychologists may call this particular condition the Ambani Complex, just like Freud's coinage of the Oedipus Complex to describe strange mother-son love.
While people may question Dhirubhai Ambani's means to reach the end, it took a man like him to break into the vaunted world of the Tatas and Birlas, which was shielded by the government's protective charms. People close to the family say Mukesh and Anil have very strong attributes of the father (apart from their mother's traits, of course), and their personas complete the circle of genetic legacy Dhirubhai left behind.
Today, the brothers are apparently in touch with each other more than ever since June 2005. Will they come together to close the circle some day? Well, miracles do happen in that family.
Abhijit Majumder is Executive Editor, Mid Day. Reach him at abhijit.majumder@mid-day.com
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