Meet
Ratan Tata
'I ask myself why I am doing
this and I think it is perhaps the challenge. If I had an ideological
choice, I would probably want to do something more for the uplift of
the people of India. I have strong desire not to make money but to see
happiness created in a place where there isn't."
RATAN TATA,
discussing business and quoted by Gita Pramal in The Fire Figher
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By
Jeff Booth
The
Ontario Jaguar - OnLine
INDIA has,
in the past, been thought of as an exotic,
faraway place. A colony. The Third World.
Wrong.
With
the electronic age the subcontinent is now as close as next door. An
independent nation with deep, deep culture, history and sense of
place in the world. A nuclear power.
But don't ever
call it part of the Third World -- it is part of the Developing
World, a world ever-increasingly defined by globalization and global
economic life.
It
is into this cultural millieu that Ratan Tata was born, 69 years
ago, as part of Mumbai’s wealthy Tata family. He is the great
grandson
of the founder of the Tata group. He was born into an economic
empire.
He
is a shy man. He drives himself to work in a Tata car and has lived for
years in a book-crammed, dog-filled bachelor flat in Mumbai’s Colaba
district, one of the hippest districts in the crammed west coast city.
His
education includes private school in India and Cornell University,
where
he graduated with a degree in architecture and structural engineering.
He has never married, but was engaged once.
When
he finally joined the family businesses he worked on the shop floor
along
with other, blue-collar workers in an Indian steel mill. He shovelled
limestone and he serviced blast furnaces.
He
has not lost that on-the-shop-floor sensibility, something which earns
him great respect of workers, now that he is the celebrated celebrity
of Indian corporate culture. Fortune rates him as the 23rd most
powerful global executive, with enough chairmanships to fill a page.
He
is no ruthless capitalist. Instead, consider him a left-of-centre
business leader who, though his companies, have provided Indian workers
with benefits unheard of as workplace standards in India. Isn’t
that
the kind of thing that Henry Ford did, too? He has sponsored
cancer clinics, artworks and even youth sport awards.
Ratan
Tata is also the man who gave the world the Tata Nano, the world’s
cheapest
production car. Now, he owns Jaguar and Land Rover, prestige
icons of the English culture that once ruled over India.
He
admits to a passion for cars – their performance, styling and
technology. No doubt he enjoys this, when he drives himself to work in
a Tata car.
The
district he lives in was originally two islands, Colaba and Little
Colaba, or Old Woman’s Island. The island of Colaba was presented as a
gift from Portugal to King Charles II of England as dowry when he
married Catherine Braganze. The Portuguese had acquired the territory
from the
Sultanate of Camby, in the mid 1500s.
That
was then.
Today,
India is acquiring is own.
Take,
for example, this recent headline from The Times of India: “Jaguar
is an Indian beast now”
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