I've always been a working woman: Tina Ambani

Former actor and now chairperson of one of Mumbai's largest hospitals, Tina Ambani lives life on her own terms, with open eyes and an open mind.

Tina Ambani doesn't like labels. As she tosses her still glorious mane, her pout is almost as classic as it was when Dev Anand discovered his "Teenie Meenie" and made her, then Tina Munim, a star in Des Pardes. Call me a catalyst, she finally concedes, rejecting businesswoman, philanthropist, even corporate diva. As she surveys the one million square foot healthcare behemoth in the heart of Mumbai of which she is chairperson, she says: "I just like connecting people."

And people like her. Ask her co-star of at least six films, Rishi Kapoor, and he laughs his trademark stomach-rolling gurgle: "Tina was an original. I wouldn't call her bohemian exactly but she wasn't like these other actresses who came with an entourage, their mummies and papas. She took her own decisions and had the confidence to deal with people. She wasn't an earth shattering actress but she was very hard working." Her father-inlaw's old associate, K. Narayan, now on the governing council of the Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital and Medical Research Institute, has been working with her since she married Reliance Group chairman Anil Ambani in 1991. Whether it is gossiping with him about Delhi politics over lunch at the hospital canteen (a mix of gazpacho soup from the canteen kitchen and lauki from home) or taking his advice on yet another investment, she is at ease in her role, lightly supervising the administration, leaving the heavy lifting to trained professionals. "I don't believe in profits. I believe in pursuing my purposes," she says.

At 58, Ambani is as much of a cool chick as she was when she burst into our consciousness, winning Miss Teenage Inter-Continental in Aruba, landing on the cover of Femina and sashaying through a series of iconic films like Karz, Rocky and Souten. Media analyst Amit Khanna who worked closely with Dev Anand knew her well in those days and now. "I have seen her transform from an elfin to a fairy and then more. She is warm, effusive and transparent,'' he says. And loads of fun.

She loves what she does, which she says is the key to who she is. She gave up movies after a decade to go to America and study interior design and computer science in Los Angeles because she felt she wasn't growing enough. When she came back two years later to marry Anil Ambani, she embarked on a series of enterprises which marry her aesthetic sense to her altruism. As she says: "Harmony Art came from my working in the family textile business. After marriage, I began to take a keen interest in the design and R&D of the furnishing and textiles lines in the company. That's how the Harmony Art shows happened. We showcased about 1,500 artists and over half a million people have visited our shows over 15 years. Unfortunately, the art market took a very bad dip some years ago and so it became a little difficult. Then things just happened in our business as you know. But we still do a lot of private art shows for our old art lovers as well as workshops, residencies, and international collaborations.'' Since 2008, she's also been on the Board of Trustees of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, the oldest continually operating museum in the United States.

Then the Harmony for Silvers Foundation was born of a chance comment by a friend about not having told his mother he loved her before she died. "I really believe that graceful, comfortable and secure ageing is very important in this country because there are huge gaps in healthcare. Now that we run the hospital, I realise that these gaps are for every age,'' she adds. So the hospital, which originally was a cardiac care speciality, has become a multi-disciplined ecosystem. "I don't know how to say it, but it's been a natural progression in everything I've done. It's about the ability to touch and transform lives."

She calls herself a quiet worker who now has to be persuaded to pose for the camera. "I don't like to do tootoo-taa-taa," she says with an elegant shrug. Perhaps because unlike some other industrialists' wives, she has had her fill of it. "I'm a working woman; I have been all my life. Earlier I was working in a field that is by nature seen as glamorous; now the work I do, whether it is the hospital or with the Harmony for Silvers, is not considered glamorous. It's all about perception." She laughs when she recalls American movie star Julia Roberts telling her to write her memoirs. "What will I leave out and what will I keep?" she laughs mischievously.

She sounds almost like a new-age guru when she talks of the journey, not the destination. "I don't get anxious about wanting to achieve something. I get anxious because I want the path to be paved well. Whether I get there or not is not something which is in my hands or in my control. The journey is important, the destination is by the way."

For now, she's fully involved with the 16-floor hospital, where she's supervised everything, from construction to interiors to taking a decision on what faculty to set up. She got the land as a birthday gift from her husband in 2005 and by 2009, she had managed to get it up and running. At any given time, it has 2,300 people in it--like a mini city, she says. "We had research teams that looked at what are the gaps in healthcare in India. We tried to fill all the gaps. I really believed it was so important to marry our centuries--old culture of ethics, compassion, care with the latest technology and the latest infrastructure.'' Her next target? To make Mumbai a global medical hub.

Press her for what her hospital is special for and she rattles off the details with pride: "It's extremely patient-centric. So we have 24/7 full-time specialists. From their OPDs to their processes to all their surgeries, everything is here. It's research driven. It has the largest comprehensive liver transplant centre in Western India and the fastest growing robotic surgery programme in India. It addresses severe gaps in the system. So it has the largest comprehensive paediatric cardiac sciences programme in Western India in the private sector, with 60 per cent of surgeries performed on babies under 30 days old. It is the first comprehensive centre for rehabilitation and sports medicine in the country; the only comprehensive programme in India for gender reassignment; and the largest balloon sinuplasty programme to manage chronic sinusitis without surgery."

It's also huge. ''We don't stint on space. There is room for 500 patients, 750 beds, 150 full time doctors, 1,100 nurses and 160 junior medical staff. It's a happy place even though it's a hospital,'' she says.

We all have to give back, she believes. "One of the things when the hospital started was Anil who said to me, 'You have got so much from the society. I have got so much from the society. We need to give back.' We need to nourish the people we live with, to nourish the societies we live in, the communities we live in. You can give in cash, kind, you can give in time, whatever suits you, whatever works for you. But, giving back is very important because life is all about give and take. It's a balance that nature has created and if you miss it, it's just not right.'' Which is why the success of the hospital's Centre for Cancer has encouraged her to extend cancer care to rural India with a series of oncology centres in western India.

Giving back is also the basis of her work in organ donation. The hospital, whose credo is Every Life Matters, offers a transplant programme for liver, kidney, bone marrow and cornea with a well-trained team (medical, surgical, critical care and nursing) available 24?7, 365 days with dedicated transplant coordinators but as she notes the rate of donation in India is abysmal. "India is the second most populous country in the world, yet has a deceased donation rate of only 0.26 million people. Compare this to the US at about 26, Spain at 35 and Croatia, the world leader, at 36.5," she says, putting on her glasses and reading quite conscientiously from her prepared notes.

The Mumbai girl who studied at Pupil's Own School in Khar, then went to Jai Hind College for two years, before becoming Miss Teenage India and then Miss Teenage Inter-Continental, may seem to have come a long way from her "very middle class Gujarati family" where she was the ninth of nine siblings, but at heart she remains a Gujju girl. Filmmaker Subhash Ghai, who cast her in the iconic Karz (1980), says money hasn't spoilt her. "That's her greatest achievement. I've seen her evolve into an elegant woman of maturity who has kept intact the child within. She's real, passionate and compassionate."

She adores her boys (Jai Anmol is 24 and now in the family business and Jai Anshul, 21, is studying in the US) and has a great relationship with her husband of 25 years, whom she calls the wind beneath her wings--she cannot resist showing pictures of the three men in her family on her iPhone on holiday in Africa. She doesn't look like she's done yet. As her old friend Amit Khanna puts it: "Has she reached her full potential? No." But there's no doubt that Ambani will keep trying

TINA MUNIM, BOLLYWOOD STAR

THE GAWKY BIKINI BABE, DES PARDES, 1978

"Dev Saab said, 'OK this is the girl' and then very sweetly came to my house and pursued me. My dad said "OK, it's her choice". I was brought up like that, to take decisions on my own at a young age. Dev Saab promised he would treat me like a princess. And he did." She played a village girl turned pub waitress cum bikini babe in a beer barrel in London.

THE COOL CHICK, KARZ, 1980

Subhash Ghai says he asked her to play herself-a girl with no inhibitions, totally spontaneous. "She would act even without knowing where the camera was. It was super fun."

THE SERIOUS ACTRESS, ADHIKAR, 1987
Played Jyoti, a woman forced to be aunt to her son. This was when she really started taking her work seriously, says actor Rishi Kapoor.

TINA ON GIVING

• I believe people have to learn to give-and give with their heart.
• For me, it is about instinct and affinity. There can be many triggers, many paths-a personal experience, growing awareness about one's community, or even an interest that is developed further by study and research.
• Whatever one's trigger, it should be followed by commitment. It's easy to make news. But the need of the hour is to shape the dialogue and catalyse change. Life is about give and take and one must pay it forward.
• There's no right way or recommended way. It's not about scorecards.
• Whether you want to give in cash, kind or time, everyone must find their own path.

TINA'S MANTRAS FOR HARMONY

• The most important life lesson. Change is the only constant.
• As times, circumstances, realities change, we too should change with them if we want to grow.
• Someone once wrote that life is like changing chairs-there is no permanent compatibility between a chair and a person. And there is no one right chair. What is right at one stage may be restricting at another or too soft. During the passage from one stage to another, we will be between two chairs. Wobbling no doubt, but developing.
• Sometimes we're stuck in a cocoon and we want nothing to change. I believe that if you want to freeze time do it in a photograph, not with your life.
• There is no substitute to hard work, no free lunches. I tell my children: Work on yourself; work by yourself; work for yourself.
• Live life on your terms and do everything with open eyes and an open mind.
• Learn from your own experiences because you can't learn from other people's mistakes.
• You can't please everybody. People are going to criticise you and scrutinise you. Take the criticism and learn to deal with it
• Perfection is an illusion. Just do your best and move on.
• The journey is important, the destination is by the way.