Ratan Tata: When the titan ‘stood tall’ in the face of 26/11 Mumbai terror attack

Ratan Tata, a veteran industrialist and Tata Sons chairman emeritus died at Breach Candy Hospital in Mumbai on Wednesday evening. He was 86.

The tycoon led the Tata Group - known as a salt-to-software conglomerate of more than 100 companies, employing nearly 6,60,000 people - for more than two decades.

Ratan Tata was born in 1937 in a traditional family of Parsis - a highly educated and prosperous community 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 returned to India in 1962 when his grandmother Lady Navajbai fell ill and called for him. It was then that JRD Tata - a relative from a different branch of the family - asked him to join the Tata Group. "He [JRD Tata] was my greatest mentor... he was like a father and a brother to me - and not enough has been said about that," Tata told an interviewer.

Ratan Tata’s resolve during the terrorist attack on Mumbai’s Taj

Ratan Tata’s resilience was tested during the Mumbai terror attacks of 26 November, 2008, says a BBC report.

Tata's marquee Taj Mahal Palace was one of the two luxury hotels that was attacked, along with a train station, a hospital, a Jewish cultural centre, and some other targets in Mumbai.

Thirty-three of the 166 people who died in the 60-hour siege were at the Taj. This included 11 hotel employees, a third of the hotel's total casualties. Tata pledged to look after the families of employees who were killed or injured, and paid the relatives of those killed the salaries they would have earned for the rest of their lives, said the BBC report. He also spent more than $1 billion to restore the damaged hotel within 21 months.

“In the immediate aftermath of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, I met him while staying at the iconic Taj Hotel. In that moment of national crisis, the titan stood tall and became the embodiment of the Indian spirit, to rebuild and emerge stronger as a nation,” said actor Kamal Haasan in a post on X, paying his respects to the late industrialist.