photo feature

In the frame ... forever

A photo gallery of Ratan Tata as child and adult, at work and at leisure, in business and in philanthropy, with friends and family, his passions and his pets

 

Ratan Tata (right) with father Naval Tata and stepbrother Noel Tata in the early 1960s
Ratan Tata with grandmother Navajbai Tata
During his student days at Cornell University, USA
With mother Soonoo and younger brother Jimmy
Ratan Tata at a Cornell dance
Sporting a Gandhi cap (second row from top) in a 1956 photograph with Cornell batchmates
Ratan Tata (last row extreme right) at Cornell University in 1959
Goofing about with his Cornell ‘crazy group’
Ratan Tata giving golf a go in Jamshedpur
On the Telco (now Tata Motors) shop floor in Jamshedpur
Ratan Tata with an unidentified little girl in Jamshedpur in 1982
Ratan Tata at a Telco (now Tata Motors) site in Jamshedpur
At a dog show in Jamshedpur
Ratan Tata, seen with JRD Tata, greets an employee during a tour of the Telco (now Tata Motors) facility in Pune
Ratan Tata with JRD and then Tata Steel managing director Russi Mody in Jamshedpur
With JRD at an event in Jamshedpur
JRD Tata with Ratan Tata in the Bombay House boardroom on March 25, 1991, after announcing the name of his successor as chairman of Tata Sons. Many years later, Ratan Tata would remember JRD thus: “[He] was just fantastic... He was available for counselling, he was available for advice, he was available for guidance ... He was an encouragement to me in my early days and he had become like a second father to me... I often told him that I wished that both of us were ten years younger so that we could have enjoyed the relationship that had developed for a longer period of time.”
Ratan Tata greets then British prime minister, the late Margaret Thatcher, at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Mumbai in 1981 during the latter’s visit to India
With acclaimed painter Maqbool Fida Husain
Ratan Tata with Barack Obama at the Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai during the American President’s visit to India in October 2010
With another American president, Bill Clinton, in Mumbai in an undated photograph
Ratan Tata at the launch of the Nano in Mumbai in March 2009
Posing with the Indica, the first ‘Indian car’, soon after it was unveiled in 1998
Ratan Tata and Noel Tata at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Mumbai in 2018
Ratan Tata presents Noel Tata, then managing director of Trent, with a Tata group ‘business excellence award’ that the company won in 2009
Ratan Tata with Tata personnel in South Africa following the inauguration of Tata Africa in 2004, the year Tata Motors’ passenger cars were launched in the country
On board a Tata company jet during one of his business trips
Ratan Tata receiving the Padma Vibhushan, India’s second-highest civilian honour, from President Pratibha Patil in 2008
Ratan Tata at Cambridge University in June 2010, when he was made an honorary doctor of law by the institution
Ratan Tata receiving an honorary doctorate at the Ohio State University, USA, in 2001
Ratan Tata receives the Rockefeller Foundation’s lifetime achievement award from Judith Rodin, the foundation’s president, in New York in 2012
Ratan Tata after being inducted into the ‘hospitality industry hall of honour’ in 2011 at the Conrad N Hilton College of Hotel and Restaurant Management, University of Houston (USA)
Ratan Tata with Amar Bose, the founder of Bose Corporation. He once said of Mr Bose: “I have shared many things with him... He has had a profound impact on my thinking.”
Ratan Tata with his Ferrari California car, a personal favourite
Ratan Tata at the controls of an F-16 aircraft at the Aero India Show in Bengaluru in 2007 (he was the co-pilot on this flight)
Ratan Tata in the cockpit of a commercial aircraft in an undated photograph
Ratan Tata with his pet Tito sometime in the mid 1980s
With staff at the Tata Trusts’ Small Animal Hospital in Mumbai
With another of his pets, Goa, a stray that he found during a trip to Goa and adopted