Ratan Tata, the former chairman of Tata Sons, passed away at a Mumbai hospital on Wednesday night at the age of 86. Tata, who led the salt-to-software conglomerate for over two decades, died at 11:30 PM after being in intensive care since Monday. He was a recipient of the Padma Vibhushan award.

After earning a B.S. in architecture from Cornell University in 1962, Tata joined the family business. He became chairman of Tata Industries a decade later and succeeded his uncle, JRD Tata, as chairman of the Tata Group in 1991, after JRD's more than fifty-year tenure.

In a 2020 interview with Humans of Bombay, Ratan Tata reflected on his early childhood, his parents' divorce, and a time when he almost got married. He shared, “I had a happy childhood, but as my brother and I got older, we faced a fair bit of ragging and personal discomfort because of our parents' divorce, which in those days wasn’t as common as it is today. But our grandmother brought us up in every way. Soon after my mother remarried, the boys at school started saying all kinds of things about us — constantly and aggressively. But our grandmother taught us to retain dignity at all costs, a value that’s stayed with me until today.”

Regarding his near-marriage, Tata recounted, “After college, I landed a job at an architecture firm in LA, where I worked for two years. It was a great time — the weather was beautiful, I had my own car, and I loved my job. It was in LA that I fell in love and almost got married. But at the same time, I had made the decision to move back at least temporarily since I had been away from my grandmother, who wasn’t keeping too well for almost seven years.”

He continued, “So I came back to visit her and thought that the person I wanted to marry would come to India with me. However, because of the 1962 Indo-China war, her parents weren’t okay with her making the move anymore, and the relationship fell apart.”