Ratan Tata: The Poster Boy of Capitalism with a Conscience

“Thank you for thinking of me,” Ratan Tata said on October 7 in what would be his last social media post. The 86-year-old had learnt that there were “rumours circulating about his health” and wanted to assure everyone that he remains in good spirits. About 48 hours later, Ratan Tata was no more. In a country with abject poverty, a history of socialism and an ingrained suspicion of the rich, Ratan Tata was a billionaire. Yet he was loved. And this was long before the establishment voices started scolding Indians into loving its “wealth creators”. 

Ratan Tata was an extremely successful businessman. In the two decades he remained at the helm of the Tata Group’s affairs, he took the company’s revenue from $5.1 billion to $100 billion. He quite literally transformed Tata into a global brand. Yet no one ever called him a shrewd businessman. 

Ratan Tata was born on December 28, 1937 into a Parsi-Zoroastrian family closely involved with India’s freedom struggle. His father Naval Tata had been adopted by Ratanji Tata, son of the Tata Group founder Jamsetji Tata. Mahatma Gandhi, in his obituary for Jamsetji had written: “In whatever he did, Mr. Tata never looked to self-interest…Though he possessed unlimited wealth, he spent nothing from it on his own pleasures. His simplicity was remarkable. May India produce many Tatas!” 

The young Ratan Tata had these values ingrained in him. People who knew him closely say that he hated ostentatious displays of wealth from a very young age. It is said that he would flinch at the fancy car that would arrive to take him from school. He said once in an interview that he would be so embarrassed that he would keep requesting his grandmother Navajbai Tata (who raised him after his parents split) to “at least send a different car” and would sometimes walk home in an act of teenage rebellion.

Not Living The American Dream

Ratan Tata did a part of his schooling in Mumbai, a part at the Bishop Cotton School in Shimla and another part at the Riverdale Country School in New York. In an interview in 2000, he said he “loved America from a young age”. His father, however, wanted him to go to the UK and learn to be a chartered accountant. But Tata did what he wanted to do, and went on to study architecture at Cornell. 

He then found a job at an architect’s office in Los Angeles. “After I graduated [from Cornell], I wanted to be in some place where it was warmer and ended up in Los Angeles in an architect’s office,” he told Moneylife in an interview in 2008. And there he would have remained if his grandmother wouldn’t have called him back. “I would not have come back to India since I was very happy there. But my grandmother fell ill and she asked for me, so I came,” he said in the interview.

In the initial years of his joining the Tata Group, Ratan Tata repeatedly thought of returning to the United States. He lived in Jamshedpur at the time, working shop floors first at Tata Motors and then at Tata Steel, managing the blast furnace and shovelling limestone. He was not allowed to drive his car to work as the mandate from those at the helm was that he had to take a bicycle. Angry at “being told how to live my life”, in an act of youthful rebellion, he would walk to work, Ratan Tata told Karan Thapar in an interview in 2000. At the time, Ratan Tata felt that his stint at Tata Steel was a “never-ending apprenticeship”. Later, however, he would go on to describe that period as defining.

Taking Over Tata

Ratan Tata’s first official assignment within the Tata Group’s management was to revive its beleaguered subsidiary National Radio and Electronics (NELCO). It was this that finally made him decide to stay back in India. He felt that even though the company had suffered, the electronics industry had potential. With NELCO, Tata had initial success before the company collapsed during an economic downturn.

Around the 1980s, Ratan Tata had started growing aware of the Tata Group’s need to pivot towards technology. In a letter he wrote sitting beside his ailing mother at a hospital in 1982, he suggested that the group should venture into high-tech areas. But not many were excited. They did not see the political and business environment of the time as very conducive to the private sector. It was only when Rajiv Gandhi came to power in 1984, certain areas of the economy started opening up.

Through the ’80s, Ratan Tata would go on to manage Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Tata Sons, Air India and Tata Industries. In 1991, when JRD Tata decided to step back from the business after a minor heart attack, he named Ratan Tata his successor. Tata later said that he wasn’t the obvious choice and that there had been others who were supposed to succeed JRD.

In the initial years of his chairmanship of Tata Sons, Ratan Tata focused on consolidating and streamlining businesses of the group. This included exiting certain businesses such as detergents and soaps just as the Indian economy opened up. 

The results of his restructuring then and the direction in which he steered the company are for all to see: TCS is the second-largest company in the country with a market capitalisation of Rs 15.4 lakh crore. The cumulative revenue growth while he was chairman of the Tata Group was nearly 1900%. Later, he would go on to acquire British car-makers Jaguar and Land Rover, making Tata not just a global brand, but a global premium brand from India.

A Reluctant Dynast

Despite his business success, Ratan Tata was never really comfortable in his skin. Business historian Gita Piramal told The Guardian in 2008 that Ratan Tata had never been fully reconciled to being the scion of a family firm. She said, “The Tatas are a reconstructed family who adopt and cobble together people to make a family. That way they do promote talent rather than blood relations. Ratan was talented, but he resents the implication.” 

For him, dismissiveness of material luxuries while building a global business empire was not in contrast. In living an austere life, driving himself to places, abjuring usual vices of smoking and alcohol, and being a speed freak flying jets, he saw no contradiction.

Materialistic growth never really mattered to one of India’s most astute businessmen. “One day you will realise that material things mean nothing. All that matters is the well being of the people you love,” he used to say. But love, at least in the more romantic, formal, familial sense, eluded him. Ratan Tata was never married, nor did he have any children. He had confessed that he had fallen in love with a young woman while in the US. 

“The only reason we did not get married was because I came back to India. She was to follow me. That was the year of the Indo-Chinese conflict. In true American fashion, this conflict in the snowy, uninhabited part of the Himalayas was seen as a major war between India and China. So, she didn’t come,” he told an interviewer some years ago.

But he did believe in love. He once said he had been in love “seriously” four times. And when he was asked at the age of 63 if he would still get married, he said: sure, if there is someone. About the decision to never have a family, he felt conflicted. While he enjoyed the freedom, he suffered from its loneliness, he told Simi Garewal in an interview in 1997. On October 9, 2024, he died, survived by a legacy of innovative entrepreneurship and philanthropy.