How can you worship Reliance of all things??!!

Today I will answer this. I am sick of everybody asking me this question. Nobody is able to understand how I can worship a company in the first place and that also a company like Reliance that unlike Infosys and TATA group is infamous for its business style.

Everybody has a religion and a God. I am not talking about the religion one is born with but the religion one is passionate about. And, as far as I know, India has three major religions – Cricket, Cinema & Politics.

Cricket is like the Hindu religion. You have an extensive list of Gods to choose from; led by the holy trinity of Sachin Tendulkar, Kapil Dev and Sunil Gavaskar.

Cinema is another religion that is not far behind when it comes to the list of available Gods to worship. The most obvious choice being Amitabh Bhachchan followed by the others like Sharukh Khan and the rest.

Next comes Politics. Its like the Muslim religion – Acts of select few has brought bad name to the whole religion to an extent that a major section of the society looks down upon this religion and wish that religion should be banned altogether. But yet is a very powerful and influential religion that would last till the end of mankind and we can’t ignore its existence. And like all religion it also has its share of Gods. Mahatma Gandhi being the biggest one having the stature like that of Prophet. Most others are small time leaders who pop up on the scene from time to time, few of them by leveraging Gandhi’s name.

I donot belong to any of these major religion. I belong to a minority religion called “infrastructure”. I know most of you have not yet heard of this religion. It is a very small religion with very few followers and unlike a few other religions we do not believe in forcibly converting people.

What is this religion all about? This religion believes that only real development of India is possible by improving infrastructure. It believes lack of infrastructure is the biggest bottleneck and the only thing that is not allowing this country and its people to live up to its potential. This religion aim to create state-of-art infrastructure in the country and give its people an opportunity to take on the world. This religion also believes that infrastructure can be built without any subsidy, just on commercial terms. All it requires is - government should not create artificial road blocks like taxes, licensees etc. All we want from government is to stay off as they did with the software industry in the initial phase.

Now tell be what options do we have for God of Infrastructure.

A company that built the world’s biggest & most efficient petroleum refinery making India net exporter of petroleum products (most of us have forgotten what oil shocks did to our economy to appreciate that).

A company that had guts to create 80000 kms of optic fiber infrastructure in matter of 12 months linking each and every corner of the country and making telecommunication affordable for the masses.

A company that would provide solution to electricity problem, a problem that should have been solved long back.

A company that is building cities that will give Indian an alternative to Mumbai and its crumbling infrastructure. (I still don’t understand how people manage to live in a city like Mumbai. Traveling everyday for hours just to reach office in crowded dilapidated trains in conditions that are not fit even to carry animals).

A company that is creating retail infrastructure that the whole country is waiting for.

A company that is building ports, roads, airports, power plants, cities and everything that government should have done long back but failed to do.

As far as I can see there is only one God of Infrastructure – Reliance or Dhirubhai Ambani, the man who created this company. And that’s why I worship him.