Article: Is this man for real? ; A section of market men dismisses him as a front for Mukesh Ambani. Others wonder whether he's building castles in the air.Yet, it's impossible to ignore Nikhil Gandhi and his grand game plan of sinking $20 billion into a clutch of big-ticket infrastructure projects.

One day in the early 1990s, Nikhil Prataprai Gandhi was almost beaten to death by a mob protesting against the development of a port at Pipavav in Gujarat. The port was conceptualised in 1990 by SKIL Infrastructure, a company Gandhi founded with younger brother Bhavesh. Gandhi was badly wounded in that attack. After he came out of hospital, he visited Shirdi in Maharashtra to offer prayers at Saibaba's shrine. In Shirdi, he befriended a Saibaba follower who, in 1992, introduced Gandhi to the late Dhirubhai Ambani, founder of the Reliance group. That meeting changed his life. If Dhirubhai uncle had not helped me, I would have been dead, says Gandhi. Ambani taught Gandhi the virtues of ...

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