Ratan Tata, who has died aged 86, was one of India's most internationally recognised business leaders. The tycoon led the Tata Group - known as a "salt-to-software" conglomerate of more than 100 companies, employing some 660,000 people - for more than two decades. Its annual revenues are in excess of $100bn (£76.
5bn). Founded by Jamsetji Tata, a pioneer of Indian business, the 155-year-old Tata Group straddles a business empire ranging from Jaguar Land Rover and Tata Steel to aviation and salt pans. The ethos of the company "yokes capitalism to philanthropy, by doing business in ways that make the lives of others better", according to Peter Casey, author of The Story of Tata, an authorised book on the group.
Tata Sons, the holding company of the group, has a "number of companies that includes privately held and publicly traded companies, yet they are in essence all owned by a philanthropic trust", he explains. Ratan Tata was born in 1937 in a traditional family of Parsis - a highly educated and prosperous community that traces its ancestry to Zoroastrian refugees in India. His parents separated in the 1940s.
Tata went to college in the US, where he got a degree in architecture at Cornell University. During his seven-year-long stay, he learned to drive cars and fly. He had some harrowing experiences: he once lost an engine while flying a helicopter in college and twice lost the single engine in his plane.
"So I had to glide in," he told an interviewer. Later, he would often f.
