Ratan Tata for you may be a man with access to all the luxuries in life but happens to be, that life has treated him the way it treats most of us. In a nutshell, the industrialist has had his share of struggles, which he reveals about in an interview with the popular page Humans of Bombay.
And once you will read the same, the only thing you will think of is that why I can relate so much with the same?
The post begins with him talking about how his parents got separated in childhood which invited a lot of bullying as divorce wasn’t a common thing at that time. Moreover, the bullying only grew after her mother got married to another man and he was left with his grandmother.
He recites that her grandmother has played a major role in raising him. And surely, that is something that comes naturally to grandmothers. They would often know more about us than we personally do and would stand beside us no matter what.
Like most of the grandmothers, Ratan Tata’s granny embedded good values into him and his brother.
“I remember, after WW2, she took my brother & 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’ & that’s where ‘dignity above everything else’ really embedded in our minds”.
In the middle of the post, he recalls how his and his father’s views would always repel. He says he wanted to study in the US but his father wanted him to study in the UK. He wanted to learn violin but his father wanted him to learn Piano.
And when it comes to career, he “wanted to be an architect,” but his father “insisted on becoming an engineer”.
Again his grandmother came to his recuse. Though he was enrolled for mechanical engineering, she stood by his side when he decided to switch majors and he graduated with a degree in architecture.
He then goes on to reveal that he fell in love with a girl during his first job and almost ended up marrying her. Almost, because they couldn’t as he had to return India because her grandmother wasn’t doing great health-wise.
He thought that the person he wanted to marry would come to India with me, but she couldn’t because her parents weren’t okay making the move after the 1962 Indo-China war.
Life lesson? Life treats all of us equally. All of us get the same number of chances. However, it is decisions we make when life gives us lemons is what decides the sweetness and the bitterness of the lemonade.
