Renowned industrialist Ratan Tata provided a rare insight into his personal life on the eve of Valentine’s Day, by disclosing that while he was in Los Angles in the early sixties, “I fell in love” and “almost got married”.
Baring his heart out on a public platform, the Chairman Emeritus of Tata Sons revealed in a post posted on a Facebook page ‘Humans Of Bombay’ as to how he fell in love, “almost got married”, how the 1962 Indo-China came in the way of tying a nuptial knot and “the relationship fell apart”.
Tata was in mid-twenties when he fell in love while he was working for
architecture firm in Los Angles in the early sixties. “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,” Tata wrote on a Facebook’s “Humans of Bombay” page.
“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,” Tata recalled.
“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 parents weren’t okay with her making the move anymore, and the relationship fell apart,” the industrialist revealed in a post put out on Thursday.
Eight-two-year-old Tata, who has remained a bachelor all his life after having devoted al, his time to build a huge business empire, does not seem to have a regret that he did not marry – an impression one gets from the manner-of-the-fact manner in which he has narrated as how the relationship with the girl whom he fell in love with did not culminate in marriage.
Giving a peek into his childhood, Tata wrote on “Humans of Bombay” FB page: “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. 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. It involved walking away from these situations, which otherwise we would have fought back against,” Tata wrote. I still remember, after WW2, she took my brother and I for summer holidays to London. It was there that the values were really hammered in.
She’d tell us, ‘don’t say this’ or ‘keep quiet about that’ and that’s where, ‘dignity above everything else’ really embedded in our minds,” Tata stated, while going down the memory lane.
“And she’s always been there for us. It’s difficult now to say who’s right or wrong. I wanted to learn to play the violin, my father insisted on the piano. I wanted to go to college in the US, he insisted on the UK,” Tata wrote.
“I wanted to be an architect, he insisted on me becoming an engineer. If it weren’t for my grandmother, I wouldn’t have ended up at Cornell University in the US. It was because of her that even though I enrolled for mechanical engineering, I switched majors and graduated with a degree in architecture,” the Tata Group patriarch recalled.
“My father was quite upset and there was a fair bit of rancour, but I was finally my own, independent person in college, and it was my grandmother who taught me that courage to speak up can also be soft and dignified,” Tata remembered his grandmother’s contribution to his evolving himself as a person as he is today.