He would have smiled wryly at the irony, maybe even have had a chuckle in acknowledgement of its acuity, had he been told this. The soul of the man whose corporate name he made known globally was probably free to soar uninhibitedly only after he ceased to head the Tata Group.
In the dozen-odd years he lived after he stepped down as the Chairman of Tata Sons, Ratan Tata finally got to do what he loved to do: make a difference. Seed a business. Take a risk. Solve a problem harnessing technology. Work with young people inspired by a trail-blazing idea. Ideally not just a solution to an everyday problem; that yes, but one with many potential social ripples. In short, be the essence of him: an entrepreneur.
He helped seed over 50 businesses after 2012, none he loved more than Good Fellows, offering companionship by the young to senior citizens. Not all 50 flowered but some did, bringing returns he acknowledged he could never have imagined. And he never ceased to marvel at the ease and rapidity with which technology made it possible to convert an idea into a marketable solution.
It was ever so, that he wanted to find solutions. He knew his mind but legacies weighed. But it was ever a struggle, till eventually his obduracy prevailed, helped by mentors.
He wanted to be an architect and study in the US; his father wanted him to enrol in an engineering college in the UK. He leaned on his grandmother; his surrogate mother after his parents divorced. And he went to Cornell, and switched majors from engineering to architecture.
The USA was liberating. He landed a good job in Los Angeles, where he loved the weather, fell in love, not for the first time in vain, got himself a car, which must have had an open hood, and committed himself to the good life. Till his grandmother fell ill seriously. He knew he had to do the right thing: go home and be with her. And join the Tata group at Tata Steel in Jamshedpur.
They gave him a fancy bungalow in the Steel City and a car but he preferred to walk to the steel plant. He had many ideas on how they could make steel more efficiently and safely but they would quote prevailing norms older than his 25 years.
He found his metier in Nelco, a small electronics company, he could restructure and grow. He even breathed life, briefly, into Tata’s textile mills. In the group, he came into his own as the Chairman of Tata Industries in the early 1980s with a charter to implement the new path he wanted the Group to take: collaborate with the world’s best to seed companies incorporating the latest in technology-led growth sectors. Enter Tata Honeywell, Tata Lucent, Tata Cummins, and Birla-Tata AT&T.
His forties tested his steel even as he spread his wings. As deputy chairman of Tata Motors, he entered into a staring contest with a militant trade unionist. He did not blink first. As Chairman of Air India, he was constantly at odds with the top management, ever resistant to his efforts to restore the airline to its heydays under JRD Tata, still the Group Chairman.
He was 53, young for the legacy-doused Tata Group, when JRD, now his mentor, chose him as his successor because he had a “modern” mind. The move coincided with India unshackling itself from the licence raj with the 1991 reforms. This, too, was just so: Ratan Tata was the rare Indian industrialist who genuinely wanted the Indian economy to be opened up. Being globally competitive was no longer a choice for India and for the Tata Group.
Over the next two decades, Ratan Tata would remake the venerable group. From a loose bunch of companies run by numerous satraps with their own fiefdom of companies, the Tata Group became a cohesive conglomerate with companies in seven sectors, some smoke stack but many in the nimble-footed and growing Services sector of the rapidly consumerist Indian economy. Symbolically, Tata acquired its first Group logo after being around for over 100 years. On the ground, it acquired a group glue and a holy grail in the Tata Business Excellence Model to make the companies globally competitive.
The Group also went global, aggressively, mainly as a hedge against dependence on one cyclic economy, India. Tata Tea acquired the much bigger Tetley. Tata Steel won Corus nee British Steel in a bruising auction. Tata Motors bought Land Rover and Jaguar from Ford. The world saw reverse colonialism as major British bands turned Tata. Ever the realist, Ratan Tata noted wryly that he was only keen to acquire Land-Rover to give his beloved Tata Motors a wider automotive footprint and a technologically superior collaborator. The more glamorous Jaguar marquee was thrust on him by Ford who would only sell both brands.
Now well into his 60s, he would often regret that he was not much younger. There was so much more he wanted to do though by now his fame had spread far and wide and he was a global business icon. Not a bit was because, it was incorrectly but widely reported, that he owned less than one per cent of the group, which spent two-thirds of its income on philanthropy. In truth, he owned around one per cent of the Group holding company, Tata Sons, which, in turn, was two-thirds owned by Tata Trusts, of which also he was the Chairman, and which, of course, received two-thirds of the Tata Sons dividends.
It is these dividends, invested in addressing India’s poverty and improving its social infrastructure for well over a hundred years, which gives the Tata Group a unique halo and that rare social capital – trust. Nobody was more conscious or prouder of this trust than Ratan Tata. He would often say that you cannot be socially good and moral in parts; either you deserve the people’s trust or you don’t. He would strain every nerve to embed into the Group’s hundreds of thousands of employees that this trust was precious; it had to be nurtured in every deed and action.
There were to be no exceptions. When one company CEO, known to be close to him, went rogue and placed the financial company in serious jeopardy, he made it known the Group would honour every deposit, and brought to bear the full brunt of the law on his favourite.
Was he conscious that he had a haloed name? Was he proud of it? Yes, to both. But he wore the name with humility and willingly bent to the demands it made on him. For which he had his grandmother to thank. He has spoken feelingly about how his grandmother instilled in him the virtues of doing the right thing.
She also taught him how to guard one’s dignity -to walk away rather than get into an undignified confrontation. Mostly he did that but there were exceptions. Most recently it was when he declared war on Cyrus Mistry who he ruthlessly ousted in a board coup, braving unprecedented public and media ignominy.
Earlier, it was the Nano plant in West Bengal. When it came to combating Mamata Banerjee’s opposition to the Tata Motors’ plant in the rice fields of Singur he declared, with dignity: If somebody puts a gun to my head, I will not be the one to move my head. At a cost of hundreds of crores of rupees, and a crippling delay, the Nano plant was moved to Gujarat.
Of all his entrepreneurial endeavours, the Nano was closest to his heart. He was visibly proud, in his understated way, when he shared with some of us that Tata Motors had acquired the patent on the Nano name for the car. Conceived out of a desire to find a solution to the common sight of a family of four on a scooter, it was his challenge to a team of young Tata Motors engineers to come up with an affordable car. They did and he could proudly say into the strobe lights at its glittering launch: a word given is a word honoured.
Somebody who made a difference, nothing more and nothing less. That’s how he recently said he would like to be remembered. He could not have put it more pithily or accurately. He was that rare individual who had his feet on the ground and his head in the clouds. He could see beyond many horizons because he was committed to solving society’s most pressing problems by harnessing frontier technology.
He was, eponymously, and now posthumously, a Bharat Ratan.
(The author is a senior journalist who took a break from journalism to work in Ratan Tata’s office for over a decade.
(Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author)
