‘#TataStories’: Legends from a timeless institution

Seema Pathela Sachdeva

“No success or achievement in material terms is worthwhile, unless it serves the needs or interests of the country and its people, and is achieved by fair and honest means.”

These words have been extracted from a memorable letter that JRD Tata wrote in 1965 in response to a query from a Kolkata schoolteacher, KC Bhansali, seeking to know the guiding principles that had governed the grand patriarch’s life. The letter is extraordinary not because it was in reply to an ordinary request, but because it is these very principles that have inspired generations of Tatas.

For every Indian, the name Tata is synonymous with the history and growth of the country — the two, at times, seeming inseparable. While words like ‘Make in India’ have become fashionable today, many visionaries from the business house saw this as the way forward for the country to progress. Setting up the country’s first steel plant, first airlines (Tata Airlines later became Air India), first cancer hospital, first silk farm, first Indian car, world’s slimmest watch, one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, first national centre for performing arts, establishing the country’s first institute of science, besides many more firsts, have been the Tatas’ contribution to nation-building.

Be it a pension gratuity fund for employees, a creche at the Empress Mills in Nagpur, or making a provision for accident claim fund in times when employee welfare schemes were unheard of, people came foremost in Jamsetji’s vision.

Harish Bhat, who has been a long-time employee of the Tatas and is currently the brand custodian of one of its companies, brings alive heartwarming tales like how Jamsetji Tata successfully convinced the leading consulting engineer Charles Page Perin to start a steel factory in an underdeveloped country in 1902, how in a prestigious flying competition, a good deed led to a lifelong friendship between JRD and Aspy Engineer, how Dorabji and Meherbai’s ‘jubilee diamond’ saved the Tata Group, the challenges that came Ratan Tata’s way when he set out to manufacture India’s first indigenous car, etc.

The book is dotted with anecdotes and vignettes that fill one with amusement. For instance, JRD Tata’s toilet roll inspection in the airlines, astronaut Kalpana Chawla carrying a photograph of the patriarch’s inaugural mail flight on her first mission into space or the Tata Patter magazine puncturing egos of innumerable MPs, ministers and the company’s directors with its sarcasm.

While the 40 feel-good stories, which at times read like a hagiography, take you down memory lane into the world of the legendary Tatas like Jamsetji, Dorabji, JRD, Lady Meherbai, these also pay tribute to illustrious names like Sumant Moolgaokar, Nani Palkhivala, Darbari Seth, Russi Mody, Xerxes Desai, Nevill Vintcent, Bobby Kooka and Dr John Matthai, who have been associated with the over 150-year-old conglomerate.