Industrialist Ratan Tata, who remained unmarried and dedicated all life to the Tata Group, has rarely talked about his personal life, even less about his love life, and how he stayed a bachelor.
In one of the rare moments, in an interview to CNN International’s Talk Asia in 2011, Tata had disclosed that he came "seriously close to getting married" four times.
"I came seriously close to getting married four times and each time I thought off in fear or for one reason or another," he had said.
Now, the celebrated industrialist has revealed one such incident when he missed out on getting married due to the Indo-China war of 1962.
Writing for Facebook page Humans of Bombay, Tata disclosed that he fell in love while he was working for an architecture firm in Los Angeles and almost got married. He, however, moved back to India and the parents of person he was in love with did not allow her to come to India because of the war.
"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 7 years," the 82-year-old Chairman Emeritus of Tata Sons wrote.
"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," Tata revealed.
He also spoke about his childhood and how he was very close to his grandmother who imbibed the values in him and his brother.
“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 parents’ divorce, which in those days wasn’t as common as it is today,” he said.
"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. 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," he added.
"I still remember, after WW2, she took my brother and I for summer holidays to 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’ really embedded in our minds," he wrote.
The tycoon also shared how he fought with his father to study architecture.
"I wanted to learn to play the violin, my father insisted on the piano. I wanted to go to college in the US, he insisted on the UK. I wanted to be an architect, he insisted on me becoming an engineer. If it weren’t for my grandmother, I wouldn’t have ended up at Cornell University 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," he wrote.
My father was quite upset and 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, Tata added.
