When Ratan Tata 'almost' got married

MUMBAI: Nearly five years ago, on the eve of Valentine's Day, the darling of the corporate world, Ratan Naval Tata, bared his heart to reveal how he was struck by Cupid once during his stay in the US and he “almost got married”.

Allowing a rare peek into his strictly private domain, the renowned industrialist – who passed away at 86 late on Wednesday night – detailed his brief love story that nearly ended in a marital alliance.

According to his social media post on February 13, 2020, Tata said it had happened in Los Angeles, after college when he landed a job at an architecture firm.

The period he mentioned was sometime in the early-1960s.

He had a great time in Los Angeles where the weather was beautiful and the young Tata in his mid-20s had his own car plus a job he loved.

"It was in LA that I fell in love and almost got married. 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 seven years," Tata said.

However, he later went to visit his secret flame, optimistically believing that the person he wanted to marry would relocate to India with him - though his hopes were dashed later.

"But because of the 1962 Indo-China War, her parents weren't okay with her making the move anymore, and the relationship fell apart," said Tata, the Chairman Emeritus of Tata Group in a candid post on the Facebook page 'Humans Of Bombay'.

After losing his first love, though Ratan Tata self-admittedly came “close to marrying” a few times later in life, he was unable to wed for various reasons and completely immersed himself into looking after his huge business empire and remained a bachelor.

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However, he said that there were no regrets. "I had a happy childhood, but as my brother (Jimmy) and I got older, we faced a fair bit of ragging and personal discomfort because of the divorce of our parents (Naval H. Tata and Sooni Tata), which in those days wasn't as common as it is today," he recalled once.

Soon afterwards, when his mother got remarried, the boys at school started saying all kinds of things about them, constantly and aggressively, he recalled.

However, at that time, his grandmother, Navajbai Sett-Tata raised the two brothers - Ratan and Jimmy - and taught them to maintain dignity at all costs, "a value that's stayed with me until today."

Most of those situations involved "walking away" otherwise they would have fought back against them, he had admitted, sharing fond memories of his strong bond with his granny.

"I remember, after World War 2, she took my brother and I for summer holidays in London. It was there that the values were really hammered in. She'd tell us, 'Don't say this', or 'Keep quiet about that' and that's where 'Dignity above everything else' was really embedded in our minds. And she had always been there for us. It's difficult now to say who’s right or wrong," said Tata.

Opening up on the series of differences he harboured with his father, Tata said while he wanted to play the violin, his father insisted on the piano, he wanted to study in a US college, but his father insisted on the UK, he wanted to become an architect, but his father wanted him to become an engineer.

Here again, it was his grandmother who rushed to the rescue. "If it weren't for my grandmother, I wouldn't have ended up at Cornell University (College of Architecture, New York) in the US. It was because of her that even though I enrolled for Mechanical Engineering, I switched majors and graduated with a degree in Architecture," Tata wrote, adding that his father was quite upset with all this.

"There was a fair bit of rancour, but I was finally my own, independent person in college, and it was my grandmother who taught me that courage to speak up can also be soft and dignified," said the living legend behind the Tata Group, who has now passed into eternity.