Isha carries this spirit with her to her workplace, where she’s actively trying to appoint more women at every level. “When you hire young women in junior roles, it’s so important for them to have senior female mentors to understand what their career progression will look like. I was 23 when I started working at Jio [telecommunications] and 90 percent of the time, I was the only woman in the room.” One way to level the playing field, according to her, is to create equal opportunities for women by interviewing them for executive positions that have historically been ceded to men. “The NMACC team is mostly women. I had just given birth around the launch, and when I had to pump, no one batted an eyelid,” Isha recalls, underscoring her personal motivation to build her empire with women by her side. She also credits her strong support system at home for helping her transition into a working mum. “A mother has to take on a disproportionate amount of labor because there are a few things, like breastfeeding, that only she can do. But there’s a bunch of other stuff that both husband and wife can and must do when it comes to parenting.” Did Anand rise to the occasion? “I’m grateful to him, yes. He does the diaper changes and feeding. On the nights I have to stay up late or be away working, he makes sure he’s around so I don’t feel as bad.”
Isha swears by an anecdote ex-PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi once said in an interview about a woman’s biological clock and career clock being in conflict with each other. Her advice to new mothers, therefore, is to get the help they can afford and prioritize themselves postpartum. “It’s like they say during the safety briefing on a plane: put on your own oxygen mask first before assisting others.”
There’s no denying that having the Ambani suffix to your name comes with an assortment of privileges, including an army of employees at your service to make life easier. And Isha isn’t pretending that being able to successfully juggle a career with child-rearing isn’t a function of the privilege that she was born into. But beyond the headlines about larger-than-life weddings, prestigious acquisitions, big-ticket launches, and wearing a blouse adorned with real jadau jewels to her brother’s recent pre-wedding celebrations, the Ambani daughter, who graduated from Yale with a double major in psychology and South Asian studies, has an academic’s mind. When she speaks about what’s to come, we get glimpses of plans to bring Jio World Plaza to full occupancy and showcase grander art and culture spectacles at the NMACC. But what she’s most excited about is how the Reliance Foundation could shape the future of education in India. “The world is changing rapidly and schools need to change along with it,” she says, her eyes alight. “For our parents’ generation, libraries were a source of information. Our generation relies on the internet for referencing. The generation after us will have access to artificial intelligence outside their bodies. What is going to be the role of the human brain?” She pauses, then jokes about being prone to rambling when discussing her passions. I nod encouragingly and she picks up where she left off. “Today, it’s common in schools to see two teachers with a set of 30 students. In schools that have the budget and resources, you might see three to four. Their idea is to slot kids into groups and deliver a customized learning experience based on their capabilities. But shouldn’t every child learn at their own pace? How can we deliver education one-to-one rather than a one- to-15 ratio? What are schools of the future going to look like? These are questions I’m wildly excited about finding answers to.”