New Delhi: Ratan Tata, the Chairman Emeritus of Tata Sons, passed away at the Breach Candy Hospital following age-related health conditions late on Wednesday. He was 86.
The bachelor industrialist had couple of years ago revealed that he fell in love and wanted to get married. He came close to getting married not once, but four times. But in the hindsight, Tata believes that it was not a bad thing to remain unmarried and the situation would have been more complex had he got married.
Tata had said in an interview on CNN International’s Talk Asia programme in 2011 said, “When you asked whether I’d ever been in love, I came seriously close to getting married four times and each time it got close to there and I guess I backed off in fear of one reason or another”.
He replied in the affirmative when asked whether he had ever been in love. When asked how many times, he replied, “seriously, four times.”
Asked to speak more about his love life, Tata said: “Well, you know one was probably the most serious was when I was working in the US and the only reason we didn’t get married was that I came back to India and she was to follow me…
“… and that was the year of the, if you like, the Indo-Chinese conflict and in true American fashion this conflict in the Himalayas, in the snowy, uninhabited part of the Himalayas was seen in the United States as a major war between India and China and so, she didn’t come and finally got married in the US thereafter.”
Asked why he never got married, Tata said: “Each of the occasions (the four times he was close to getting married, but did not) were different, but in hindsight when I look at the people involved; it wasn’t a bad thing what I did. I think it may have been more complex had the marriage taken place.”
Asked whether any of the people he was in love with were still in the city, he replied in the affirmative, but declined to speak any further on the matter.
“Oh, well I’d certainly because of the people that are here, of course this may be aired in the US, so I’d be in trouble, whatever I do, so I think I’d better stop here,” he added.
With Agency inputs