The hall on the first floor of the Bombay Stock Exchange's imposing building was full of the kind of quiet anticipation that settles over a room before something personal is about to be said.

On stage sat the guests of honour for the evening: Arundhati Bhattacharya, the former State Bank of India chairperson and President and CEO at salesforce, South Asia, whose memoir, Indomitable, was about to acquire a new life in Hindi as Aparajita -- the Undefeated.

Key points

• Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani launched the Hindi edition of Arundhati Bhattacharya's memoir Indomitable, titled Aparajita.
• Ambani, who was the chief guest for the event, drew four key lessons from Bhattacharya's life: Family is your first capital, take responsibility rather than blame others, remain a lifelong learner, and create more leaders.
• He highlighted Bhattacharya's historic achievement as the first woman to chair the State Bank of India, saying the best 'firsts' open doors for thousands who follow.
• Calling Aparajita a 'call to action', Ambani urged corporate India to build a stronger ecosystem for working women and working mothers, with the Reliance Foundation offering to participate.

Around her sat her husband Professor Pritimoy Bhattacharya, Deepak Parekh and other distinguished guests, all gathered for a launch that had been five years in the waiting, according to Mukesh Ambani.

When he finally rose to speak, as the evening's chief guest, he did not begin with business. He began with a daughter.

Bhattacharya's daughter Sukrita (a special child with an indomitable spirit that matches her mother's, which she displayed in her narration just before the Ambani speech), had spoken just before him, and her words had clearly stayed with the Reliance Industries chairman.

He turned to her first, his voice softening, and told the room simply that he loved her -- an unscripted moment that drew a ripple of warmth through the audience and set the tone for everything that followed. It was, from the outset, less a corporate keynote than a tribute from one family to another.

Only then did Ambani turn to the book.

He confessed, half-joking, that although he sits on boards with bankers like Bhattacharya, "I am not a banker" -- so however long and loud the applause ran that evening, "I would not be charging interest on it."

The line drew laughter, but it also served as an opening into something more earnest: He recalled that Bhattacharya had first asked him to launch the English edition back in 2021, a promise the pandemic had delayed for five long years.

Finally keeping it, he said, felt like closing a circle. And the Hindi edition, Aparajita, he added, mattered even more than the English one -- because it would carry her story past the boardrooms he knew her from and into India's smaller towns, districts and villages, to young women who might never otherwise hear it.

A Life Told in Four Lessons

From there, Ambani built his address around a childhood he clearly found remarkable -- a girl raised in India's steel townships of Bhilai and Bokaro, the daughter of an engineer who worked, as Nehru once put it, and as Ambani cited, in the "temples of modern India," who would go on to become, in 2013, the first woman in more than two centuries to chair India's largets public sector bank, State Bank of India. Out of that arc, he said, he had drawn four lessons of his own.

The Four Lessons, at a Glance

1. Family is your first capital. Success is never self-sufficient -- it rests on the people who shape your values and stand by you in hard times.

Ambani's takeaway: always be there for family, express gratitude, and never mistake professional achievement for personal self-sufficiency.

2. Do not externalise blame. When something goes wrong, look inward instead of assigning fault.

Bhattacharya learned this as a schoolgirl and carried it through her career; Ambani's version, inherited from his father, is to ask three questions after any setback -- what was missed, what must change, and how quickly one can act.

3. Remain a lifelong learner.

In a world that changes as fast as banking or business does, growth means constantly learning, unlearning and relearning -- like repairing a car while it's still running.

Ambani's advice: stay a student, and learn especially from what makes you uncomfortable.

4. Leadership means creating more leaders. No single person, however visionary, can execute a bold idea alone.

Bhattacharya's SBI principle -- collaborate inside, compete outside -- mirrors Ambani's own belief that leadership means putting the right people in the right roles, empowering them, and standing behind their courageous decisions.

The first was about family. He spoke of it not abstractly but as something he had lived himself -- the values inherited from his legendary father Dhirubhai Ambani and mother Kokilaben, the steadiness of his wife Nita Ambani, the strength of the people around him.

"Family is our first and most enduring capital," he told the room, calling it emotional, moral and spiritual capital all at once.

His counsel was simple: Be there for the people who hold you up, say thank you, and never mistake professional success for standing entirely on your own.

The second lesson came from an old memory of Bhattacharya's -- a school day, decades earlier, when she had tried to blame others for an outcome, and a teacher had gently pushed her instead to look inward. Ambani said she had carried that instinct through her entire career, through every difficult posting and every transfer that came with four decades in banking.

He matched it with a story of his father, who had believed in India's capital markets back when a young, newly returned Ambani doubted they would ever amount to much. His father's answer, he recalled, was to have faith in India's capital market and industriousness -- and fifty years on, watching India's markets among the largest in the world, Ambani said he understood what his father meant: "Setbacks are not burdens. They are feedback."

The discipline, he said, was to ask three questions after any failure -- what was missed, what needs to change, and how quickly one can act to bring about that change.

The third lesson was about staying a student for life.

Whether in banking or any other field, he said, the world moves too fast to stand still -- learning, unlearning and relearning becomes something closer to repairing a car while it is still running. He allowed himself one aside, wry and pointed, about the age he was speaking in: For all that artificial intelligence promises, he said, he remains convinced that "AI can never replace the kind of human, natural intelligence Bhattacharya had shown throughout her career."

The fourth lesson was about leadership itself.

He credited Bhattacharya's guiding principle at SBI -- collaborate inside the institution, compete outside it -- and said it echoed something he had learned running Reliance: That no vision, however bold, survives on one person's shoulders alone.

Everyone has to feel it is theirs to build.

"Leadership is not about telling and following," he said. "It is about creating more leaders."

Put the right people in the right roles, he added, give them a real mission, and then have the courage to stand behind the decisions they make.

'When the Women of India Rise, India Rises'

IMAGE: Emcee for the evening Dr Aditi Gowitrikar, Harper Collins' Sachin Sharma, the MD and CEO of Bombay Sock Exchange Sundraman Ramamurthy, Arundhati Bhattacharya, her daughter Sukrita Bhattacharya, Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani, Navya Naveli Nanda, author Monika Halan and Avinash Kaul at the launch of the Hindi edition of Indomitable, titled Aparajita. Photograph: Sahil Salvi for Rediff

It was here that Ambani's speech found its clearest thread.

India, he said, is not merely handing women development -- it is watching them lead it. Women are no longer simply the beneficiaries of the country's progress; they are its architects, in business, in science, on the sports field, in the armed forces, in villages and cities alike.

He said he had seen this strength first in his mother Kokilaben, then in his wife Nita's work building institutions, and now in his daughter Isha's generation.

"When the women of India rise, India rises," he told the room. "When the women of India become unstoppable, India becomes unstoppable."

He weaved Bhattacharya's own story into that conviction.

Breaking SBI's two-century glass ceiling was never the point in itself, he said -- what mattered was what she did after.

"The best firsts do not close the door behind them," he said. "They hold it open for thousands of others to come in."

Her continuing work on the Reliance board and with Salesforce India, he said, was proof that she was still holding that door open.

A Call to Action

Video: Hemantkumar Shivsharan/Rediff

As the evening drew toward its close, Ambani made clear this was not simply a celebration. He called the book "not an ordinary autobiography" but "a call to action" -- a reminder, even as it inspired working mothers everywhere, that corporate India still has real distance left to travel before women get what they have earned.

So he made an appeal, directly, to the business leaders in the room: that they come together to build a stronger ecosystem for working women and working mothers across corporate India. He asked Bhattacharya, and other accomplished women like her, to lead that effort -- promising that the Reliance Foundation would participate fully, alongside any organisation willing to join.

He left the audience with four promises to carry out of the hall that night:

• To value the people who stand beside us.
• To take responsibility rather than assign blame.
• To stay students for life.
• To hold doors open for those who come after.

If enough people took up those promises, he said -- especially the young women of India -- then "no challenge will be too great, no dream too distant."