Ratan Tata, chairman emeritus of one of India’s biggest conglomerates, Tata Sons, got the reins of Tata Group in March 1991. Almost three decades ago, in 1997, Ratan Tata appeared on the show ‘Rendezvous with Simi Garewal’ where he revealed how the takeover happened. JRD Tata was suffering from heart disease and was admitted to Breach Candy Hospital in Mumbai when he broke the news and asked Ratan Tata to take over.
“We were in Jamshedpur together for a function and I had to go to Stuttgart for some negotiations. When I came back, I heard he had a heart problem and he was in Breach Candy Hospital. He was there a week and I’d see him every day. He was out on a Friday and the following Monday, I went to see him in the office,” Ratan Tata recalled.
Narrating the incident, he added, “He would always start meeting by asking, ‘Well, what’s new?’ And I said, ‘J I’d been seeing you every day, there is nothing new since I saw you last.’ He said, ‘Well, I have something that is new that I want to tell you. Sit down. What has happened to me in Jamshedpur has made me think that I need to step down and I have decided that you should take my place.’ After a few days, he took it to the board.”
While Ratan Tata didn’t remember the date the news was broken to the board, Simi Garewal suggested it was March 25, 1991.
Further narrating the scene from the boardroom when “history was created” and how everyone “was moved”, he said, “I have heard many of my colleagues say that there was a history that day because apart from the fact that he was stepping down from a position that he had held for 40 to 50 years, there was a lot of emotion attached to his giving up this position in favour of someone. But the history and emotion that everyone talks about is not that move.”
JRD Tata revisited all the years he had put into the business. “He reminisced through years at that meeting and I can’t reproduce any of that emotionally or otherwise but that meeting went on like an archival recount of all his days in Tata. Never his own praise but his experiences as he went through. There was history that day and we all came out very moved.”
It was the end of an era and at the same time, the beginning of a new one.
When asked what he learned from JRD Tata, which he carries with him, Ratan Tata said, it is his sense of justice which was prevalent. “His value system, his simplicity, and his sense of justice have stayed with me and I hope I can emulate them even half.”
Ratan Tata, 86, died on Wednesday night. He was admitted to Mumbai’s Breach Candy hospital in a critical condition, where he breathed his last. Ever since then, his previous interviews have been doing rounds on the internet.
