Were you surprised by the massive public outpouring of grief at the passing of Ratan Tata? I know I was. And I think he would’ve been a little taken aback too.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised though I am convinced that Ratan, modest to the end, never expected anything like the public mourning that erupted last week.
I thought back to a time around two decades ago, when I was invited to address a gathering of senior Tata managers at a Taj hotel in Goa. It was not exactly a great time for the Tatas. The group had lurched from controversy to controversy. There had been a fuss over its dealings with militants in Assam where the group had tea gardens. There were agitations against the construction of Tata plants all over India. There were doubts that Ratan could make a success of the big Tata companies.
I don’t know enough about business to lecture top executives. So I wondered what I would say. Eventually, I decided to focus on how I believed that India was changing. I told the gathering that the Indian middle-class was growing and that its influence was increasing. This, I suggested, would lead to a shift in the national consensus. There would be widespread revulsion against corruption. People would stop accepting the explanation offered by many industrialists that they had to engage in bribery, deal in black money and adopt other corrupt strategies because the Indian system was such that you could not prosper otherwise. I believed that we would demand higher standards of Indian business.
We had seen some evidence of these changes already, I said, in the way in which the new info tech companies and the people who had started them were being regarded. These were guys from solid middle class backgrounds who shared none of the attributes of the traditional bania class of big businessmen. These were innovators who paid no bribes, who cut no corners, and who competed internationally with the world’s finest companies. Their success had turned them into heroes in India.
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In the years ahead, I continued, the Indian middle-class would develop a growing disdain for the hereditary fat cats who had got ahead by corrupting the system. They would look for business houses that played by the rules, which had a social conscience, and which refused to pay bribes.
Outside the information technology sector, the Tatas were among the only large groups that made the grade. It might take a few years for the Tatas to be more widely admired for the values they had consistently championed but it would happen, I said.
When it was time for questions, I could sense the scepticism in the room. RK Krishna Kumar, one of Ratan’s right hand men at the time, who had been bruised by the controversy over Tata Tea’s dealings with militants in Assam, got up to say that I was wrong. Krishna Kumar knew me well so he was willing to be candid, knowing that I would not take it amiss. I was being too optimistic, he said. He doubted that the public mood would change so drastically. Many in the audience clearly agreed with him but were too polite to say so to my face.
Ratan was not at the gathering, but apparently, he saw a video of my speech. He mentioned it briefly to me when we next met. My views were interesting, he said and he hoped I was right. His tone, though gentle, suggested that he agreed with Krishna Kumar.
I have often thought back to that speech and the responses it evoked then because I believe that I was right to be optimistic. The public mood has changed. We are much less forgiving of corrupt industrialists. We admire honest business people now much more than we ever have. We still like the rags to riches stories: Dhirubhai Ambani is still a hero to many people, because he came out of nowhere and shared his good fortune with so many small shareholders. But most of the business people we respect do not come from traditional business houses and they have flourished in sectors where bribery alone will not get you very far.
Take Ratan’s example. Till the end, he was a shy man who came off as reserved. Unlike say, Dhirubhai, who managed to squeeze so much warmth into each brief encounter that even if you met him for five minutes you felt that you had spent hours with him, Ratan did not have the ability to relax instantly with strangers. Even if you spent half an hour with him, you did not necessarily feel that you knew him much better afterwards.
He shunned publicity, was an awkward interviewee and valued his privacy. I often got the impression that he was much happier with dogs than he was with admiring human strangers. Of course he had friends and confidants but he relaxed most when he was flying a plane (he was an enthusiastic pilot) or engaged in solitary pursuits. Even if he had not been such a shy man, I doubt if he would ever have courted publicity. That was never his style.
So, why did so many people who hardly knew him act as though they had lost a member of the family when he passed? Why did the outpouring of grief over Ratan’s death dwarf even the sense of loss that followed JRD Tata’s passing?
I can’t help thinking back to that Goa conference and the optimism I expressed about how the public mood was changing. Indians now value honesty and strength of character much more than we have at any point in the last few decades. We know how tough it can be to play by the rules in the sectors where the Tatas operate.
And we recognise how difficult it must’ve been for Ratan to refuse to divert even slightly from the values that the Tata group was founded on.
Though he himself never talked about it, the world did discover how much Ratan cared for people and for the welfare of society as a whole. The Tata group has always been majority-owned by charities but Ratan went further than he needed to, helping those in need and eschewing any needless ostentation in his own life.
Those of us who worry that our country is in thrall to oligarchs and that vulgarity and ostentation are the norm can find some reassurance in the way India has reacted to Ratan Tata’s passing. In our hearts we still value decency, and look for compassion and humility. And when we lose a man who exemplified all of those qualities, then India sheds a collective tear.
