Mumbai, July 6 :    Mumbai, July 6:  Dhirubhai Ambani, chairman of the Reliance group, died tonight after fighting a grim battle for survival for 13 days at Breach Candy Hospital in south Mumbai. Ambani was admitted to the hospital on June 24 evening after he suffered a stroke and was on life-support system till the end. The end came at 11.50 pm. The 69-year-old Ambani is survived by wife Kokila, sons Mukesh and Anil and daughters Dipti Salgaocar and Nina Kothari. The body will be taken to his residence, Sea Winds, at Colaba in south Mumbai. A Reliance spokesman said the body would be kept there from 9 am to 3 pm tomorrow for people to pay homage. The funeral will be held tomorrow at Chandanwadi crematorium at 4.30 pm. Born to a schoolmaster in Chorwad village in Saurashtra on December 28, 1932, the founder of the Reliance group could not afford higher education. The odds were heavily stacked against him. What chance did Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani, a high school-educated spice and yarn trader, have of building a Rs 65,000 crore conglomerate with a shareholder base of over 5 million (the largest in the world) that would become India's first private sector enterprise to crash into Fortune 500? A zillion to one. But whatever he may have missed in the hallowed portals of university he learnt while strolling about the souks of Aden where he had gone at the age of 17 as a clerk with A. Besse & Co. Ltd. One of the largest commercial houses in the Red Sea area, the company had the sole distributorship for Shell products in British-administered Aden (Yemen). Dhirubhai was assigned to the Shell products division of the company and marketed Shell lubricants. Soon, he rose to the post of general marketing manager for Burmah Shell products by the age of 24. Later in life when the man became a legend, myth merged with fact and it was popularly believed that he had worked in Aden as a petrol pump attendant. The Aden years gave the young Dhirubhai two insights. First, he observed British Petroleum set up its refinery in Aden, which gave him a deep understanding of the linkages of the petroleum industry. It sparked an ambition that was to lie dormant for almost 40 years before he set up the world's largest refinery in Jamnagar with a capacity of 27,000 million tonnes. Second, and perhaps more important, Ambani went down to the souks to watch the Arab, Indian and Jewish traders ply their craft. Soon, like the other Gujarati Banias, he was playing the markets which honed his great skill in later life to lay highrisk bets - and win. In 1958, he returned to Mumbai and started his first company - Reliance Commercial Corporation, a commodity trading and export house, with an investment of Rs 15,000. The company, which he launched along with his second cousin Chambaklal Damani, operated out of a one-room office in Masjid Bandar district, shipping spices, nylon, cotton, and viscose textiles to Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya. But they soon started trading in synthetic yarn through a network of Gujarati contacts in the lucrative trade. The Ambanis lived in a one-room tenement in a chawl in Buleshwar. Soon, the young Dhirubhai mastered the art of profiting from the Byzantine system of government controls. He exported spices, and used replenishment licences to import rayon. Later, when rayon began being manufactured in India, he exported rayon and imported nylon. Still later, he exported nylon and imported polyester. He was always a step ahead of the competition - and always ready to take the big risk that none else would. By the mid-sixties, he wanted to graduate from the rank of just another trader -profits were high, sometimes as much as 300 per cent, but that didn't put you in the big league. Indian industry was then dominated by a handful of families and entrée into the charmed circle was through birth and a complex web of business relationships. Dhirubhai was the first to dare to dream that he could gatecrash into that esoteric club of top industrialists who may have initially sniffed at this parvenu, but soon had to grudgingly admire his skill at manipulating men and markets. 'Jealousy is a mark of respect,' Ambani was to remark later. In 1965, he had split with Damani - his partner in Reliance Commercial Corporation - because his cousin had no stomach for the big gambles that he so loved to take. Within a year of the split, he started a textile mill at Naroda, Ahmedabad, with four warp knitting machines and a staff strength of 70. Dhirubhai has won a lot of labels in his lifetime - some cynical, some adulatory. He has been called the Polyester Prince, a Petrochemical Potentate, but perhaps the most cherished one would be as the man who created India's equity cult. The ride into Dalal Street and the hearts of equity investors began in 1977 when he raised Rs 2.8 crore for a then unknown company, Reliance Industries. All through the 1980s, he kept coming back to the capital market with a string of primary issues of innovative instruments like equity warrants. He also had an uncanny knack for resurrecting and adding sheen to otherwise discredited financial instruments like the convertible debenture. Above all, he had the rare ability to first acquire a large body of shareholders and then keep them loyal and happy, and well rewarded, in good times and bad. Success spawned rivals and led to ferocious corporate battles - but despite all the dirt that was dredged up on his business deals and his cosy relationships with people in power, he never seemed to end up on the losing side. By the mid-eighties, he was fighting battles on several fronts - there were court cases, and a raft of allegations about manipulating the government to bend the rules so that he could most profit from it. The air was thick with intrigue, but the charges never stuck, though the suspicions lingered. His health, meanwhile, was failing. In 1986, he suffered a stroke that paralysed his right side and he was confined to a wheelchair for a while. But he bounced back with evermore grandiose plans. His myriad business interests, which were now managed by sons Mukesh and Anil, soon straddled areas like petrochemicals, synthetic fibre, fibre intermediates, textiles, oil and gas, financial services, refining and marketing, power, insurance, telecom and infocom. The simple school teacher's son soon sat at the head of the country's largest business house with total revenues of Rs 60,000 crore ($12.5 billion), a cash flow of over Rs 7,000 crore ($1.4 billion), net profit of over Rs 4,500 crore ($950 million) and exports of Rs 9,370 crore ($2 billion). Its total asset base stands at Rs 55,000 crore ($11.5 billion). In June 1998, he was awarded the Dean's Medal by The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, for setting an outstanding example of leadership - a rare honour for a man who had to give up his studies after school because there wasn't enough money in the family kitty. It's an awesome tale of grit and determination, the stuff legends are made of. Love him or hate him, there's no denying him his place alongside the two other doyens of Indian industry - G.D. Birla and J.R.D. Tata. Will there be another like him? Unlikely. But Dhirubhai himself felt that there could be many more like him. He said at one of his AGMs: 'If one Dhirubhai can do so much, just think what a thousand Dhirubhais can do for this country. There are easily a thousand Dhirubhais, if not more. I firmly and sincerely believe in this. They are raring to join the race.'