Industrialist Ratan Tata, a man of few words, once shared deeply personal details about his love life in a candid interview with CNN. Mr Tata, who died on Wednesday at the age of 86 in Mumbai, revealed that he had fallen in love and came close to getting married not once, but four times.
"When you asked whether I'd ever been in love, I came seriously close to getting married four times and each time it got close to there and I guess I backed off in fear of one reason or another," Mr Tata told CNN.
One of his most significant relationships, Mr Tata revealed, occurred during his time working in the US. He recounted how he had planned to marry an American woman, but the relationship was interrupted by global events.
"Well, you know one was probably the most serious was when I was working in the U.S. and the only reason we didn't get married was that I came back to India and she was to follow me… and that was the year of the, if you like, the Sino-Indian conflict and in true American fashion this conflict in the Himalayas, 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," Mr Tata said in the interview.
Mr Tata, who returned to India from the US in 1962 after his grandmother's illness, is credited with transforming Tata Group into a global powerhouse, overseeing a company with over 100 firms.
Mr Tata's death marks the end of an era in Indian business, where a man reshaped the country's industrial landscape and catapulted his family-owned conglomerate into a global powerhouse. Although he controlled over 30 companies operating in more than 100 countries across six continents, Mr Tata lived an unassuming life.
