Ratan Tata Talks About Carrying JRD’s Legacy Forward & More | Remembering Ratan Tata

Thank you. It's nice to be here.

Well, I have a great sense of pride that over these 125 years, Jamsetji left his legacy to the philanthropic causes, followed by his brother when Dorabji Tata when he passed away did exactly the same. Over the years, Tatas have been structured by the holding company or the proprietor's ownership being held by two charitable trusts, and over the years an increase in the number of charitable trusts that were created to work on the disparities that one found in the country at that time, a colonial country, and to work for the common good of the common man. This was a different thing. It set up cancer hospitals, schools, and institutions of that nature. It had also dealt heavily in terms of individual hardships. So through the years, the trusts have dealt with individual hardships. They have given scholarships to students. We've had past presidents of India who have been scholars of those Tata scholarships. We have created institutions which stand today like the Indian Institute of Science, which the trust did not actually set up, Jamsetji set that up. But there's an interesting anecdote there between Swami Vivekananda and the conversation that Jamsetji Tata had with Swami Vivekananda on a boardership. I don't specifically know about that conversation, but they met each other and were inspired by each other. I know that. So over the years, the trusts have focused on either creating institutions that served the common good, like cancer hospitals, etc., and institutions of learning, some internal and some domestic, and causes which were said to be for the common good. What is refreshing is that the holding company for the whole Tata Group, which Jamsetji Tata set up, 66% or at that time more, 85% of its income, dividend outflow, became income to the trust for the common good of the Indian citizen and foreign causes.

Well, I think it was a different view of ownership. Mr. Jamsetji Tata often used to refer to Tatas as being the trustees of the people. The Tata family could have become tremendously wealthy by having distributorships, partnerships, etc., in the businesses. But most of the businesses, whether it was steel, whether it was power, or institutions, were set up as institutions for the country. So Jamsetji Tata could just as well have dedicated Tata Steel to the nation or dedicated Tata Power to the nation. They belong to the shareholders and to the people. Personal ownership and personal wealth happened when it happened, but was never the criteria for these companies to be established. So it was natural that he did leave his ownership to his two sons, and then his two sons who had no children left them in charitable trust as beneficial of the companies that they held. So it's a refreshing change that gave way to ownership in an industry not being for the beneficial interest of A or B or C, but for the better good of humanity.

Well, you know, if you look at India through the years, the needs of India have changed. We had famines, food famines in the British times. We don't have famines any longer. We had a majority of the people living in the rural areas. Today there's a mass migration to the urban areas, giving finally an important issue of creating urban poverty and hardships that didn't exist before. The creation of jobs in industrial organizations today, automation and differences in terms of value chains, etc., make human jobs less important than machine jobs in many companies. So the needs of the nation have changed. Food shortages continue to exist in pockets. Water shortage is something that never existed in the past, but it's an issue today. A much larger population and creating jobs and knowledge, these are all issues that are issues of the changing times. For the trust to continue to do what they did at the turn of the century would be to be sitting in the twilight, thinking that the issues of the country were the same. And to me, that would have been a disappointment. So I think the trusts have gone through and are going through a transformation that, to use a short term, is making the trust relevant today. If we had not done that, they would have become irrelevant and creators of edifices that stood out as evidence of what the trust did but did not make a contribution to the country.

First of all, that culture becomes embodied in the DNA of an organization. It's set off by the early leaders, the founder in our case, who never was in need of wealth because he had it all, but it wasn't what drove him. Success of giving India its own independence in steel or power or the hospitality area, or what gave him the pride that he had made India self-sufficient. He didn't at that time look at the companies as being his, but being belonging to the country. Somehow that prevailed through the years, through his sons and then through JRD for 50 years or so, where JRD would stand in a line rather than jump, where he would give way to a customer first and not him. And that humility, I think, became embodied in what all the leaders of Tata companies had done. And we should protect that ferociously. The day we lose that, I think we lost an important facet or input in the companies that we have. And the day we decide to cheat, the day we decide to do something that holds something for us and not for the customer, I think we will have lost a very, very important asset.

Yes, I'd be lying if I said there weren't moments when those issues came up and those decisions had to be made. Happily, at every time, boards stood together and leadership stood together and said that's not what we do. We over the years on occasion have suffered as a result of that, but on the whole, I think we have. I believe that it's very important to come back at night and say I have not succumbed.

Sometimes you didn't know if you were doing the right thing. All things are not black and white. You have a choice. One choice leads you down a certain path long term, another leads you down another path short term. And you have to weigh one issue against another. Hopefully you make the right decision. Sometimes we don't, but we do it with innocence or naivety rather than manipulative intent and negativity. So I think that's a sort of dilemma that faces many leaders in the corporate world or politics. So it does in the business community too.

On the one hand, it was a big move for me. But on the other hand, I joined the group in '62, so I'd been in various positions on the shop floor, in Australia, in textiles, in steel, in Tata Motors through the years. And it was in relative terms easy for me to relate to the bigger issue. The one thing I had, which maybe is not so evident, is I had a terrific mentor in JRD. I remember walking back from the meeting where I was appointed chairman. When he walked back, I walked with him to his office and he told the secretary, 'Aloo, we'll have to move out of here now.' And I said, 'No, JRD, you don't move out. This is your office as long as you want it.' So he said, 'Really?' I said, 'Yes, it is.' He said, 'Where would you sit?' I said, 'Where I'm sitting today. I have an office down the hall, and that's fine.' Then I was deadly afraid that JRD would forget that he stepped down. And time and time again, because he never stepped off the companies, he remained on the board of Tata Steel or Telco at that time. And I thought, suppose he runs the group from behind and forces his view. And he never did. In fact, he was my greatest mentor. And the years that he was alive, I used to go into his office and say, 'JRD, I wish this had happened 10 years ago. We've got such a great relationship.' And he said, 'Yes, you know, I wish so too.' So I was very lucky in having him there. He lent his weight when he had to. For example, the retirement age without his support I could never have done that. He would explode if he thought something was being done that was wrong. But on the whole, he was a terrific mentor. He was like a father, like a brother. He gave advice, he always had time for you. It was a terrific relationship and very, very important. Not enough is being said about that.

I would think if I were to have to pick one, humility would be on the top of the list. He was just a person who longed to be anonymous. And to some extent, that's rubbed off on me.

Yeah, I do. And as you go through life, you find that that becomes less so and less possible. And then you look at seeking anonymity by hiding.

I think so. Because when I was in school, etc., you wanted to be part of the school and not the rich man's son or the chairman's son, or have a big car take you home while your classmates went by bus or smaller cars. You just wanted to be a normal person. And from time to time, I think I owe a lot to my father to ensure that we at no stage grew up, my brother and I, as pompous young people, but as people who would like to be everyday. And I think that has stayed with me.

Well, to me, it started by one of my colleagues, Noi, telephoning me and saying that there's some shooting at the Taj. So I called The Taj and nobody replied from the switchboard, as things turned out. I was not allowed into the lobby. The police came and they pushed everybody out. And Krishnakumar was standing on the footpath outside. I was partly there, partly home watching on television. And it became very clear in a couple of hours that it was not a gang fight or an underworld thing. It was some form of attack by terrorists or by enemies of the state. The next morning, the government rang me to say it was all over. I in fact issued a TV statement that morning saying it was all over, and it was not. It went for three days. By that time, everyone knew what it was. It was an attack by the enemy of the state. And my take on that was that whatever happened, we were under siege in this hotel. That we would, whatever they did, we would rebuild the hotel. The city would stand up and not fall down. And there was a tremendous galvanizing of the citizens of Bombay, something that made everybody very proud of the way everybody stepped up to play a role. Nobody walked away from the situation as it stood. And you felt a great sense of pride that you were a part of this great city with citizens who are not running away from what we did.

Oh, yes.

First of all, let me just say I've known Mr. Modi when he was the chief minister of Gujarat. I turned to him when we had to change factories from Singur in West Bengal to Gujarat. So I've seen him, and we'll never forget the way he found solutions for a company that was looking for a home.

What I've said publicly is he invited me to come to move the factory to Gujarat. And I said we'd come if we had a home. And he said, 'I'll get you the land you want in three days.' Amazing. And then he delivered that. On the third morning, he said, 'Ratan, here's the land that I promised.' And that just doesn't happen in India. So Mr. Modi as prime minister now is offering India, the Indian people, a new India. I think we need to give him that opportunity to offer that new India. He is able and capable of and innovative enough to look at India afresh. And I for one am optimistic that with his leadership, India will be that new India that he has promised.

Well, first of all, the embodiment of a vision that makes a startup happen is important. I'm not going to invest in a business that I have no interest in. So the business or the vision of that startup is important first. But the most important issue is to meet the founders. I have changed my views sometimes from negative to positive, sometimes positive to negative with the founders. For example, a founder that intends to just scale up his company to sell off is not a company I obviously want to be with. A founder who has a passion to stay with something and build it into a sustainable company that is taking it to this place is somebody I tend to support. So it varies. When I was chairman, I couldn't take this kind of view because somewhere or the other it would be conflicting with something that Tatas were doing. Now as a free person, it's invigorating to do this. And I'm meeting a lot of young people who one day will be leaders of their industry. And it's nice to interact with them.

That's a difficult question to answer because you get driven by some fire within yourself. You don't necessarily know what it is. It could be the people who lead an organization. It could be the passion with which somebody is pursuing what he wants to do. It may be taking the side of the downtrodden because he is being picked at. It varies from time to time. But there is an issue of wanting to make a difference. And if you can help make that happen, that consumes you and provides you with the motivation to go forward.

First of all, I hope I would never be asked anything like that because I would not be the kind of person to leave that. I don't think I could answer that off the cuff, and it's too important an issue to give a flippant answer. But I think the way such a thing ought to be done is to be freed of political baggage that often such a thing would carry, and the freedom to the person who's asked to do whatever is necessary to make that happen. Far too often you have a good idea that's squashed because of political or sociological things. It just cannot be done, though it's too difficult to be done or it's too risky to be done with public funds. And those might be the very things that are necessary to pull a country out of a particular morass that it may be in in an area. So I'd like to duck that question.

I think the only fair answer to that is there have been certain companies that I think would make everybody proud with what they have done, be it in the pharmaceutical area or be it in chemicals or be it in areas relating to rural development, which they have done more than they need to do to have a public face. And there are companies who have not. But I think if you go to any country, you would have the same mix: companies that are conscious and compassionate about the knots in their country and those who don't care.

What excites me is the area we're working in now and trying to transform the trust, because we're actually, in a manner of speaking, having the same excitement as one did in setting up an industrial enterprise, dealing now with trying to reach people, trying to provide healthcare, the National Cancer Grid, nutrition. And while the trust cannot take care of the country, we're setting some footfalls in the sand, which I must say the state governments and the central government, they're all supporting us fully. And I think what we're trying to do is taken as being genuine and honest, and it's very rewarding to see state governments and the center working with us on things that some people would say could never happen. So that's the trust.

I think it's too hot a question to answer given what we've been going through in the last several months. All I'd like to say is that I feel that the group is in very able hands with Chandra. And business is cyclic. They will have their ups and downs. We have been a group that has worked with companies when they're in peril and brought them up. And I hope we can continue to do that. In the years gone by, we will probably the group will look different over the next 10 years. There'll be companies that were not there earlier, and there'll be companies that were there not there 10 years from now because they will not be relevant or they may have been sold or transferred to another company. So the face of Tatas may change, but so long as there's still the same drive to make this an enterprise or a conglomeration of enterprises that operate with ethical standards and value systems, I think I would feel very proud.

What I would tend to want to convey is that people should do what they believe is the right thing to do. However, usually that's also the most difficult thing to do and it's the riskiest thing to do. But if they believe in something, they should pursue it. And they should, like I said earlier, try to make a difference. Not a difference that's disruptive or negative, but a constructive difference. One other thing I would like to add, which sounds politic but it's not: we as a country, or the citizens of a country, need to get back the pride that we should have that we are Indians. Not that we're Punjabis or Parsis or Tamils, but that we're Indians first. And we have a country that we belong to and that we should be proud of. We seem to be losing that somewhere. I think there are many reasons for that, but I think that can be won back to a sense of pride. We shouldn't have that sense of pride every time we go to war or have a conflict or get attacked by terrorists. It should be there all the time. And to my mind, Modi is working on that and he has been working on that.

At your spritely age, you still have multivarious hobbies, from tinkering and driving cars to flying planes to reading to architecture. Do you think in many ways this cross-functionality shaped you?

I think you can't just have one interest. You need to be able to jump. So I think I've been fortunate in having those interests. I failed in some ways when I retired. I said I would relearn the piano. I haven't done that.

And I actually started relearning the piano. I got a very able piano teacher to come and teach me, but other things overtook my ability to be consistent. And on the piano, I had one real problem: I found I couldn't get my left hand to do something different from my right hand. It was a frustrating issue, and I think that sort of waned my urge to do what would give me many hours of joy.

I really wouldn't be able to define that. There have been many moments which make one feel a sense of great satisfaction, and there have been a few times when it's almost despair.

That's an easier one to answer, because I've always felt the greatest despair I had was when Tatas decided to put Central India Mills, which was what Jamsetji started, into liquidation for, if I recall at that time, was 50 lakhs of rupees. I thought this was a very un-Tata-like move. But it was done, and many people went out of work. I saw the misery that it caused. Blue-collared workers got taken care of by the government, but the officers of the company really suffered. And that's remained in my heart as something that was a moment of despair.

I admire two people not connected with me who have been inspirational to me and have had a profound impression on what I've done and how I've done it. They have been Dr. Amar Bose, who developed Bose speakers, the Bose Corporation. He and I enjoyed a friendship that was very close and was very personal, because he opened his company to me. We spent hours and hours together and discussed various things. In fact, I knew more about the Bose Corporation than most people might have done. And the other person is a person called Henry Schacht, who was the chairman of Cummins Engine Company, where we had a joint venture with Cummins. He then became the chairman of Lucent, which was the telecom company that merged with Alcatel. Those two people were people that, and Henry continues to be today, Dr. Bose died a couple of years ago, people that have had a great influence on my career.

I haven't hidden it from people. Some people bring it out. The other day, had that not been mentioned, it would never have occurred to me to allude to something that I do all the time.

No, no, it's not something I always used to stop and talk to them because many of them are bright young kids who just don't have a chance. They're not interested in going to school, they're interested in a job. And they make more money than they would make if they were working. And they're just a part of India that's fascinating, and it's the young India of tomorrow.

It depends on the area. People like the street urchins, what chance do they have? They look for a job. They live day to day, and they sometimes skate on thin ice in terms of the law. It's a difficult thing. And to relate them to a middle-class family that works hard, goes to school or college, aspires to be in a company, the wants are different, the aspirations are different. But all of them put together would make a tremendously entrepreneurial India.

Well, I'm very happy to see that we've held together for that period of time. And many companies disintegrate in that kind of period or are just a tombstone. And I think we should do everything we can to preserve it and to continue that. As I said earlier, the group may change, it may look different in the next 30 years, 50 years, but it should embody the same values and the same ethical standards that it has had. It should never forget that most of its earnings go to philanthropy, not in the pockets of founders and leaders, and that it's doing something for the common good of mankind. I think that's very satisfying if that were to happen.

What I said earlier: I'd like to be remembered as a person who made a difference. Not anything more, not anything less.

Thank you, Sahil. It's always a pleasure to deal with you and to interact with you.