File photo of Ratan Tata, the former Tata Group chairman
Credit: Reuters Photo
Mumbai: The otherwise shy and very private Ratan Tata once spoke about his plans of marriage.
Tata fell in love while he worked in the United States but he had to return to take care of his ailing grandmother and the Indo-China war of 1962 ended everything.
On the eve of Valentine's Day in 2020, he gave a peek into his otherwise private life on Facebook to 'Humans of Bombay’.
"After college, I landed a job at an architecture firm in LA, where I worked for two years. It was a great time -- the weather was beautiful, I had my own car and I loved my job. It was in LA that I fell in love and almost got married," the tall and handsome Tata wrote.
But, Tata had to return to Mumbai to take care of his ailing grandmother.
"But at the same time I had made the decision to move back at least temporarily since I had been away from my grandmother who wasn’t keeping too well for almost 7 years," he said.
Narrating further, Tata said: "So I came back to visit her and thought that the person I wanted to marry would come to India with me, but because of the 1962 Indo-China war her parent’s weren’t okay with her making the move anymore, and the relationship fell apart.”
Speaking about his schooling days, he said: “I had a happy childhood, but as my brother and I got older, we faced a fair bit of ragging and personal discomfort because of our parent’s divorce, which in those days wasn’t as common as it is today. But my grandmother brought us up in every way. Soon after when my mother remarried, the boys at school started saying all kinds of things about us -- constantly and aggressively.”
Sharing personal details for the first time ever, he said: "But our grandmother taught us to retain dignity at all costs, a value that’s stayed with me until today. It involved walking away from these situations, which otherwise we would have fought back against.”
Ratan Tata, the former Tata Group chairman who transformed a staid group into India's largest and most influential conglomerate with a string of eye-catching deals, passed away on Wednesday. He was 86.
Tata, who was chairman of the salt to software group for more than two decades, breathed his last at south Mumbai’s Breach Candy Hospital at 11.30 pm on Wednesday.