I had the good fortune of meeting Mr Tata and interacting with him multiple times over the past 30 years. He was an esteemed client of Rediffusion and a very close friend of my boss Diwan Arun Nanda. When I joined the agency way back in 1994, getting to meet Mr Tata and presenting to him on various occasions was one of the biggest bonuses.
I still remember the first time I met him in person. It was a meeting at Bombay House and I was going to present the brand strategy for Tata Tea. I think the year was 1995. The meeting had been organised by RK Krishna Kumar (KK is what he was more commonly referred to), then MD of Tata Tea, and I was told we had only 30 minutes with the big man. I felt personally elevated (in fact exhilarated) when Mr Nanda introduced me to Ratan Tata and I got to shake hands with him. Honestly, I was a wee bit nervous in the presence of Mr. Tata but his warm demeanour and benign smile put all my jitters to rest very quickly. What surprised me most was Mr. Tata’s ability to just soak in vast amounts of data – I had distilled hundreds of data points from the retail audit and he stopped me at least half a dozen times to ask questions and seek clarifications. In fact, when KK tried to interject a couple of times, he silenced him, asking me to explain what was on my slides rather than have KK intervene. The presentation went really well and Ratan Tata actually told Mr. Nanda, “You’ve got a fine boy there.” I was over the moon.
Another big meeting of mine with Mr. Tata was when in 2001 we as Team Rediffusion were presenting to him and his top brass for the Tata Media AoR – for the first time ever the Tata Group was going to consolidate its entire media planning and buying with one agency. I was President of Rediffusion by then and I was to make the final pitch presentation. Mr Tata sat through the one-hour presentation without saying a word. When I finished, he just looked at Mr Nanda and asked him, “Arun, what should the Tatas be doing in digital going forward?” To be honest, digital as a medium was still in its infancy. For Ratan Tata to want to know about the digital future of Tata Group spends just goes to show how keyed in he was into where the world was headed much before any of us.
My most memorable interactions with the Tata titan were a few years later when I was Chairman of Dentsu India. We used to work very closely those days with Nira Radia of Vaishnavi, the PR agency that handled the entire Tata Group mandate for nearly a decade. Nira took me one day to the Taj for a meeting with Mr. Tata. The agenda: a corporate campaign for the Tatas. Mr Tata spoke at length on the Tata values, the Tata Way, about Tata Trusts and more. Most of what he said was about what Brand Tata stood for – not about turnover or profits – vision yes, but values more.
We went back to him with a one-slide presentation. All it said was: Tata = Trust. Mr Tata was quiet for a while. Then he asked me, “And how will that translate into Hindi and local languages?” I had anticipated that question. “Tata kahiye ya trust, ek hi baat hai.” He was again quiet. Must have been more than a couple of minutes. He finally looked at Nira and said, “I like the simplicity of the line. Let’s run with it.”
Ratan Tata was a doyen par excellence, the tallest captain of Indian industry. But in person, he was anything but forbidding. Interactions with him were invariably warm and he never let you feel the pressure of his towering presence. Sometimes his thoughtful interludes of silence did get you to start feeling somewhat panicked (Did I say something amiss? What’s he thinking?) but the conversation would invariably progress without any adverse reactions or criticism.
Mr. Tata is going to be missed: for being a dream client, a respectful client and an appreciative client. You don’t meet many of those these days.
Mr Tata sir: a million salaams. May you Rest In Peace.
