It was in January of 2016 that I had an opportunity to meet with Ratan Tata, who at that time was Tata Trusts’ Chairman and also Chairman Emeritus of Tata Sons. I had sought a meeting with Tata to interview him for my book on Titan: Inside India’s Most Successful Consumer Brand. Bhaskar Bhat, then managing director of Titan Co, had requested an appointment on my behalf and Tata had graciously agreed.

On the appointed day, I headed to Elphinstone building at Horniman Circle in Mumbai’s Flora Fountain area, which has an old world charm about it. The meeting was on the third floor in the glass-panelled Tata Trusts office. A couple of dogs were sleeping peacefully in a room, I recall. Tata arrived on the dot at 10.30 am, dressed casually. His office itself was minimalistic, with light streaming in from a balcony garden.

While he fielded my questions on Titan from his memory, I took the opportunity to ask him about his investments in multifarious start-ups and digital India, an interview which was published as the top story in businessline. At that time he had made personal investments in over 20 start-ups, which swelled to 56 at present. Asked about his faith in start-ups and also his statement that many were driven by valuation and not evaluation, Tata had said that in exuberant times, large sums come from overseas which had caused that valuation to take place. But, as he said then, it may not be a bubble but there would be a balancing out phenomenon and some companies would fail, some would be sold to stronger companies and some kind of rationalisation would happen. Events proved him correct.

Tata said he was glad to see the transformation to a digital economy. “It’s quite heartening to see what it has done to the average and less privileged Indian; it’s given them stature, ownership and identity. It has transformed the marketplace. We have a potential market for a billion smartphones, and those who can upgrade to smartphones as time goes on will do so,” he had said.

So, what digital India had done was to put a retail outlet in one’s pocket. “And, as more and more Indians get involved with the Snapdeals, Flipkarts, Amazons and Googles of this world, India is going to blossom into a huge consumer marketplace. It is a transformation that has already taken place; it’s not a bubble and is there to grow. There will be ups and downs in individual companies, but I think digital India is here to stay,” Tata had said.

In the interview, he said there was a bright future for entrepreneurs in India, but that there needed to be an understanding that it was not their money and they need to have a responsibility to their investors. “Some entrepreneurs talk of a high burn rate, high advertising rate, and so on, with no outcome, so it doesn’t impress me. But an entrepreneur who has that kind of a feeling of responsibility towards his investors is somebody who will have all my support,” he had explained.

Asked about his personal experiences in the digital world and if he did a lot of e-commerce shopping, Tata said the digital world had overtaken him. “There was a time in the mid-1980s when I considered myself quite literate in these areas; now I am finding myself lost in the new internet world and what it has done, and I am five to ten or twenty steps behind, as the case may be, in the usage and understanding of what there is. I am feeling more irrelevant in this area and amazed that my cook’s daughter or my bearer’s son can do much more on this front than I am able to,” he had said.

As for Titan, which was in the doldrums in the late 1990s and early 2000s as its Europe business had failed badly and Tanishq too hadn’t taken off, Tata said that while he did not ask the company to go slow on Tanishq, “I was also one of the people who was not every excited about the jewellery business,” he said in the interview. However, as Bhaskar Bhat recalled, after Tanishq became a success, Tata, at a business excellence committee meeting graciously acknowledged the success of Titan’s jewellery business. He said, “We have been proved wrong!” Tanishq would, of course, soar in later years, and contribute to more than 80 per cent of Titan’s revenues, making it a jewellery business with a watch business attached, rather than the other way round when Tanishq was launched.

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