In a 2020 interview with Humans of Bombay, Tata opened up about his early childhood, the impact of his parents’ divorce, and a personal story about how he almost got married.
Ratan Tata, the former chairman of the Tata Group, passed away at the age of 86 in a Mumbai hospital on October 9. Tata, who led the diverse salt-to-software conglomerate for over two decades, took his last breath last week. The Padma Vibhushan awardee had been in intensive care at the hospital for 2 days.
After completing his B.S. in architecture from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, in 1962, Tata joined the family business. A decade later, he became chairman of Tata Industries. In 1991, he succeeded his uncle, J.R.D. Tata, as chairman of the Tata Group, leading the company after his uncle’s half-century tenure at the helm.
Ratan Tata On Parents Divorce
“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.”
Ratan Tata Fell In Love
In a same interview with Humans of Bombay Ratan Tata told that after graduating with a degree in architecture, he was working 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 added in an interview to 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.