Since last year there has been a nation wide appeal to boycott Chinese products in India.
The Government of India even banned a lot of Chinese apps in the wake of this situation.
There were some similar situations during the 1962 conflict between India and China too. The understanding between India and China went for a toss. The famous slogan ‘Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai’ got converted to ‘Hindi-Chini Bye Bye’ within no time!
It was during this time that one of the biggest industrialist of India, Ratan Tata was very close to getting married but the marriage did not happen. At the age of 82, Ratan Tata is still unmarried.
In an interview to CNN International’s Talk Asia, Ratan Tata said, “I came seriously close to getting married four times and each time I backed off in fear or for one reason or another”.
He added, “Each occasion was different, but in hindsight when I look at the people involved, it wasn’t a bad thing what I did. I think it may have been more complex had the marriage taken place.”
Relationship with an American girl in Los Angeles
When asked about the number of times he fell in love, he confessed, “seriously, four times”.
When Ratan Tata was asked about his love life in an interview to CNN International’s Talk Asia programme, he said, “I was probably the most serious when I was working in the US and the only reason we didn’t get married was that I came back to India and she was to follow me. That was the year of the Indo-Chinese conflict. This conflict in the snowy, uninhabited part of the Himalayas was seen in the United States as a major war between India and China and so, she didn’t come and finally got married in the US thereafter.”
There is not much information available about that American lady who was in Ratan Tata’s life.
Ratan Tata almost got married
In an interview with Humans of Bombay he revealed, “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. 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.”
His parents had a Divorce
In the interview he opened up about his parents’ divorce saying, “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 parent’s divorce, which in those days wasn’t as common as it is today. 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.”
Differences with his father
Talking about his relationship with his father, Ratan Tata told that his father’s thinking was very different from his thinking. He said, “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 added, “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.”
Thank you,
Team HopyTapy