WITH Ratan Tata’s passing, the Tata Group, Indian business and the country have lost a great leader and role model. Ratan was a trained airplane pilot, like JRD Tata before him. I have flown with Ratan in single-engine planes in rough weather when he was completing the flying hours required for his licence. What he accomplished as chairman of the Tata Group in the 1990s was the conversion of an airplane in flight with all stakeholders aboard. The group has been modernized and enlarged.
Ratan converted the reliable airplane he inherited from his predecessors into a modern jet capable of flying farther and competing internationally. The Tatas are not what they used to be, nostalgic old-timers say, though the group remains what it has been for over a century: the most widely trusted pillar of Indian industry.