Smile after stiff upper lip at HQ

MUMBAI: It���s a bright Wednesday morning as we walk past the posters screaming Sale in the Tata-owned Westside store at Kala Ghoda. Ironically, a few hundred metres away at Bombay House, the Tata Group has just overseen India Inc���s biggest overseas buy. Given the landmark deal, it is rather surprising to find minimal activity here at 9:30 am.

Even the guard who stands between us and the august portals of the Tata empire takes a cautious approached when quizzed about the deal: ���We have received no official confirmation of the deal so I can���t say anything,��� he says.

And that is the response our question elicits from almost every Tata employee we meet for the next half an hour. We try to strike up a conversation with the receptionist to get a sense of the organisational mood but she is unmoved. If she is excited by the deal when then she certainly does a good job of not showing it.

By 10.15 am the place is buzzing as employees enter the building in droves. A young woman disembarks and even as she pays the cabbie, a colleague yells out, ���You���ve heard of it na? Isn���t it amazing?��� Finally some show of emotion!

But as we introduce ourselves to the duo, the smiles disappear, only to be replaced by the all-too-familiar corporate stiff upper lip. ET���s best efforts to get them to relive the elation they displayed a few minutes ago finally gets them talking. ���We are really excited. We believed all along that the better company would walk away with the honours,��� they tell us. So are there any plans for a champagne party being thrown by Bombay House? Will they be celebrating with some cake in office? They tell us that they don���t know and they might find out if we let them get into office first.

By now the driveway is a flurry of activity with big cars pulling in and senior executives disembarking and entering the building. Most of them skilfully avoid our questions, but the few that we corner won���t go beyond monosyllabic expressions of pleasure: All we get are a series of responses such as ���delighted, happy and very happy���.

That���s when we spot Tata Sons executive director Gopalakrishnan. Understandably the man is in a rush but pauses to give us a brief sound bite: ���I feel really good about it.��� While Mr Gopalakrishnan is not very forthcoming his driver Suresh is more than happy to tell us how he feels. Says Suresh, a Tata employee for 30 years, ���I am very happy for the company. After all this will make our company the fifth largest in the world.���

Obviously everyone in the Tata Group from top to bottom has been tracking this deal closely. Soon the crowd begins to thin and we are ready to move on. But behind the doors of Bombay House it is likely that the stiff upper lips have broken out into wide smiles and the emotions are running high after a hard fought victory.

After all only a hundred years most Brits dismissed the very thought that Jamsetji Tata would be able to produce steel in India. And as for the Tata���s buying a steel plant in Britain? They probably would have said that it would never happen in a thousand years.