‘Friends distanced themselves from me, distanced themselves from failure’: Ratan Tata on his journey

"There are many things that, if I have to relive, maybe I will do it another way. But I would not like to look back and think what I have not been able to do."

"I don't believe in taking right decisions. I take decisions and then make them right." (Photo: Ratan Tata/ Instagram)

Industrialist Ratan Tata, in a speech from the Automotive Hall of Fame in 2015’s Induction and Awards Gala Ceremony, shared his journey of transforming India into a mobile economy.

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“The greatest pleasure I’ve had is trying to do something that everybody said could not be done. I decided that India could produce its own cars. Everybody, my friends who oversee in the automobile business said this couldn’t be done, and that we would have to go through collaboration to get to know how to produce technology. But, we undertook to produce this car. It was called the Indica, and we produced it in India, totally of Indian content,” Tata — born 1937, as the great-grandson of Jamsetji Tata (JRD Tata), who founded the Tata group — said.

“As we got close to pulling it in the markets, my friends in India, somewhat distanced themselves from me, otherwise known as distancing yourself from failure. When the car came out, I suddenly felt that I didn’t have a friend in the world, and all the warnings that people had given me were probably going to come true. But the car did come out and earned 20 per cent of the market share and we showed that we could do something. It transformed the Indian economy to a mobile economy.”

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The industrialist is the recipient of two of the highest civilian awards — Padma Vibhushan (2008) and Padma Bhushan (2000), and is India’s most respected and loved, celebrated for his business ethics and philanthropy.

The moral of the story is no goal is hard enough if you dream it every day!