Ratan Tata, former chairman of Tata Sons, died at a Mumbai hospital on Wednesday night. He was 86.
Tata, who was chairman of the salt to software group for more than two decades, breathed his last at at 11.30 pm on Wednesday. A Padma Vibhushan recipient, Tata, was in intensive care at the hospital since Monday.
Tata joined the family firm after acquiring a B.S. in architecture from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, in 1962. He became chairman of Tata Industries a decade later and in 1991, took over as the chairman of the Tata Group from his uncle, JRD Tata, who had been in charge for more than half a century.
In an interview with Humans of Bombay in 2020, Ratan Tata went to lengths to talk about his early childhood day, his parent's divorce and the time when he almost got married.
“I had a happy childhood, but as my brother and I got older, we faced a fair bit of ragging and personal discomfort because of our parent’s divorce, which in those days wasn’t as common as it is today," Ratan Tata had said.
“But my grandmother brought us up in every way. Soon after when my mother remarried, the boys at school started saying all kinds of things about us -- constantly and aggressively. But our grandmother taught us to retain dignity at all costs, a value that’s stayed with me until today.”
Further, Ratan Tata told Humans of Bombay that after graduating with a degree in architecture, he landed at an architecture firm in Los Angeles and this was where he fell in love and almost got married.
“After college, I landed a job at an architecture firm in LA, where I worked for two years. It was a great time -- the weather was beautiful, I had my own car and I loved my job. It was in LA that I fell in love and almost got married. But at the same time I had made the decision to move back at least temporarily since I had been away from my grandmother who wasn’t keeping too well for almost 7 years,” he told Humans of Bombay.
"So I came back to visit her and thought that the person I wanted to marry would come to India with me, but because of the 1962 Indo-China war her parent’s weren’t okay with her making the move anymore, and the relationship fell apart,” he added.
Boost your career with IIT Delhi's Tech & AI Leadership Programme. Enroll Now
Source Name : Hindustan Times