Monday, 23 December 2024
Monday, 23 December 2024
Ratan Tata, industry titan and recipient of India’s second highest civilian honour, Padma Vibhushan, passed away on Wednesday at Mumbai’s Breach Candy Hospital. He was 86 and had been under intensive care.
Ratan Tata achieved fame for his contribution to create a $403-billion software-to-steel colossus with operations in 100 countries. His group is the largest employer in Britain and till this week had 60,000 people on its rolls.
But there was more to Ratan Tata than business and commerce. He was an ardent animal lover, passionate about cars and aircraft, and a man who showed India that an Indian company can be a global behemoth.
The Telegraph Online looks at the many sides of Ratan Tata.
Imagine getting a lifetime achievement award at a ceremony at none other than Buckingham Palace, home of the British monarchy. No one would miss it. But Ratan Tata skipped the Queen’s Liftetime Achievement Award for Enterprise Promotion on February 6, 2018. Prince Charles was supposed to award him.
The reason? One of Tata’s dogs was unwell.
The Tata office in Mumbai is famous for providing a vast room near the entrance where stray dogs can get shelter and food.
A quick scan of his Instagram posts shows him making an appeal looking for a dog blood donor, posting pics of abandoned/lost dogs and looking for their owners, and asking car owners to check under their cars before switching on the ignition and speeding up as dogs take shelter under cars during the monsoon.
Tata Motors, a $44 billion organisation, is a leading global automobile manufacturer of cars, utility vehicles, pick-ups, trucks and buses. The company employs 91,000-plus people, sells over 1 million cars per year and exists in 125 countries.
In Britain, the Tatas made headlines with their acquisitions of the luxury car, Jaguar Land Rover. The purchase of Jaguar Land Rover has been a resounding success, because of the popularity of Land Rover.
In January 2022, Ratan Tata visited the Jaguar retail outlet in Los Angeles, California. Who did he meet there? Slash, the famed guitarist from Guns N’ Roses, who was taking delivery of his new Jaguar XKR.
“A very polite rockstar,” said Ratan Tata about Slash.
As per a report in Business Standard, Ratan Tata once said, “I have two passions in my life- cars and aircraft,” in an interview with L’Espresso, an Italian media company.
“I have always dreamt of being able to be a fighter pilot.” he also said.
He was 81 years old when he flew an F18 Super Hornet fighter jet at the Bengaluru Aero India Show in December 2019. But his love for flying planes goes back a long, long way, to the 1950s when he was a teenager.
“I learnt flying in Bombay but was too young to solo. I was fourteen years old and I had to stop. Then when I went to Cornell I started flying again. The legal age to get a licence was seventeen and on my seventeenth birthday I went solo and I’ve been flying ever since.” Tata said in an interview to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, for its Oral Histories programme.
