Dedicated to my friend and saviour,
my dog Winter

A Note by

Ratan Tata

A SHARED CONCERN FOR the welfare of the homeless, hungry, ill-treated and abandoned dogs and cats brought Shantanu and me together. He and his young friends had been bootstrapping a small start-up in Pune to feed, care for and find homes for these poor animals. He earned recognition when they made reflective collars, based solely on passion and kindness for animals.

Knowing my love for dogs, he wrote to my office, not even expecting a response. I was impressed by what they had done and the compassion that Shantanu and the college kids had shown by investing their personal time and resources. I decided to invest in his start-up, and they received not just support but also encouragement to grow it through personal involvement.

I was also impressed by his sincerity and offered him a job on the completion of his studies. Shantanu took the job and joined me in my office. He shares time between assisting me in our philanthropic activities, the development of the Tata Trusts’ long-term plans and helping with start-up investments. He has become a member of the small team which is driven by their desire to help others. Each day has a lesson to be learnt and each day is one of fulfilment that he has brought happiness to someone, or sadness at not having been able to do so.

I hope Shantanu can be a shining light of kindness who will continue to be driven by genuine goodwill, and I am thankful that he is able to help others from deep within his heart.

Ratan Tata

December 2020

Introduction

THE PAGES OF THIS book are the result more of heart and story and less of artistic capability. It is my honest narration of what some of you might see as adventures, others as essays, and even more of you as a running journal, and all of you would be right.

Many of you will turn these pages to know about Mr Ratan Tata. And while I wish I could have done only that—to fully understand him from how I see him—this is a short memoir of my life where it overlaps his.

It took courage to bring these stories to you. To be able to put my life out there, to be seen and be vulnerable. But the purpose of writing them was to bring to you facets of someone who grew into so many roles: mentor, friend, a warm-hearted and wise guide. Facets unknown to the world that has revered him only as a beloved industrialist.

On the day he finished reading the manuscript, he wrote me a letter to say how touched he was to see these stories on paper. It is a letter I hold dear, especially for the lines where he also wrote about Mr J.R.D. Tata. ‘Jeh [as JRD was often called] used to enjoy embarrassing me, but it was our mutual love and affection for each other that grew exponentially. You have many attributes that I admire. You are like a son or younger brother, I enjoy being in your company.’

My only hope for you is for these pages to leave your heart a little fuller, slightly richer, and to share what I have seen, just as I saw it.

As a celebration of the circumstances that brought us together, all author proceeds from this book will be used for the welfare of animals in need. For this, I thank you with all my heart.

1

Motopaws

STORIES THAT END pleasantly don’t always start in pleasant places. This one certainly doesn’t. It’s hard to forget the late night when my motorcycle screeched to a stop under one of the many orange streetlights on a road in Pune. Cars sped by threateningly. I knew what I had seen that had made me pull over. Falsely hoping it might be something else, I looked at the centre of the road in the distance. A white dog with brown spots lay in a pool of his own blood. I was right the first time.

This is where it started—the first nudge of destiny’s curious finger on the first domino.

He wasn’t run over just once. And it wasn’t even a one-off incident. It was the sixth time I had had to pull over in those couple of months with nothing left to do but stare helplessly. I used to imagine doing terrible things to the people who had run over the dogs—worse to those who had run them over after they had died. Grief would fill my insides thinking about their last moments and how lonely they must have been, apart from their obvious pain. Were they crossing the road to meet their friend? To see their puppies? To find food? But it’s not like my conscience spared me any shame. I should have had, at the very least, the decency to move the dead dog to the sidewalk. I didn’t.

At work the next day, with colourful curses, I would go on to describe how evil we are as a race, not letting anyone do their job until my passionate preaching was done. On one such preachy morning, a colleague pulled me aside hesitantly to tell me about the time he had run a dog over several years ago.

‘I had no choice. It was either that or to swerve the car at the last minute and drive my family off the road,’ he said.

‘Last minute?’

‘Yes, last minute. I didn’t see him until the very last minute.’

After making sure I didn’t hold it against him and that we were still friends, he left. But the ‘last minute’ part of the story stayed with me. Was this happening with all the drivers that ran over dogs? Over the next few weeks, I was obsessed with finding out and set out to speak to people who had been in accidents involving dogs or close calls of some sort. All of them had a similar story to tell.

‘They appear so suddenly.’

‘The streets aren’t well lit.’

‘I didn’t even get a chance to slow down …’

If there was any way of fixing this, it wasn’t just about making the dogs visible. They had to be visible from a distance. Enough distance to give a driver time to think about what his next move should be to avoid the dog on the road.

I took all of this and sat down with Mihira, the girl I was seeing then. To call Mihira an animal lover would be a grossly unfair understatement. She was a cute little passionately dedicated animal soldier who would go to great lengths for a rescue. We discussed making the dogs visible.

‘We should put something bright on them. Shiny collars!’

I can imagine how very lame that must sound now. Mihira must have really been into me to be into this. Or equally lame.

But being her sweet, unselfish self, she obliged.

‘What would we make them from?’

‘Well, we don’t have a lot of money, so something cheap? My fashion designer friends said we could use denims.’

‘Yes! Oh, oh! We can cut denim pants! Let me go home and stitch one.’

Cut pants and make dogs shine. Sure.

As an automotive design engineer at Tata Elxsi, I was aware of the reflective tape used on cars. It’s bright, is seen from a distance and reflects any light that falls on it at a direct angle. I bought a few meters of the red tape for Mihira and she brought back a stitched collar the very next day, done well enough to get us excited. She also put slits and a button on it.

‘Let’s test this! Let’s collar a dog.’

Growing up in Pune you get to know pretty much all the nooks and crannies of the city. We went to a rather lazy one where a dog was kind enough to let us put the collar on. In fact, he didn’t care as long as he was being cuddled. With his wiggly butt and happy with this sudden attention, he didn’t even notice us putting it on. We took a ride around the block and returned with the headlight on.

Words cannot capture the glory with which the clueless dog shone that night. A beautiful, glowing phoenix! A fat and cuddly phoenix that couldn’t fly. But the collar worked!

As with any project you are giddy with excitement about, we decided to name it first. A weird christening process later, ‘Motopaws’ was finalized. ‘Moto’ for the drivers and ‘paws’ for the dogs. Concerns were raised about it sounding very similar to ‘menopause’, but we stuck with it anyway. A local tailor was willing to cut up denims and stitch us 500 collars. I don’t know if it was because of the ridiculousness of Motopaws or because of the fact that it involved dogs, but the rest of the team just put itself together. Mihira, my best friend Sukrut and I, with the addition of another friend called Kalyani, branched out to discover hyper, young students dying to join this … well, for the time being, let’s call it ‘charade’. All of them donated denims they were no longer using. Large, small, ripped, pink, purple ones even. Denims that we dumped on the no-longer-enthusiastic tailor.

The launch was planned with the maximum extravagance that our small group of students could allow. The logo. The name. Practicality nauseates me, I say proudly, even as it has bitten me in the rear often.

‘This has never happened before; we really need to get the city’s attention.’

‘Okay, what do you suggest?’

See, the thing about this team of fifteen-odd youngsters was that it could be rallied to do anything, absolutely anything, as long as I demonstrated conviction in whatever we were about to do. We partnered with Harley Davidson, Triumph Motorcycles and KTM motorcycles to do the launch with us. Their intimidatingly cool-looking riders promised to join us across the city to collar the dogs on launch day. Each night closer to the launch was sleepless and thrilling.

The big day showed up rather suddenly. Volunteers were in proper uniform. Motorcycles rumbled out one after another to their assigned dog-collaring areas. Goosebumps of every variety.

Everyone had put faith in a twenty-three-year-old skinny me. And I couldn’t understand why. If I saw me, I would probably roll my eyes and walk away. But for whatever reason, they showed up.

I owed this much. To the dogs lying in pools of blood with nobody by their side in their final moments. The puppies who would never understand what happened to their mothers. The few who had risked their lives and swerved at the last minute to save dog lives. And everyone who showed up that day.

We had 500 collars and we collared 500 dogs. So many more could have been collared, but we only had so much money. And then, we waited.

I woke up to someone sharing a link to the first article that was published. Before I finished reading it, there was another. And it went on. Not long after, all the large online media houses were obsessing over Motopaws. At one point, we didn’t even know where it was getting featured nor did we have any control over it. A scandal could not have gotten more attention that day. But it is obvious why. I mean, nobody thought a bunch of students would just go out and fill the night streets with shiny dogs.

But the most important responses, the ones we were looking for, were the anonymous comments online, in the corners of the internet, from people who had spotted the collared dogs in the night, or on a blind kerb, or when speeding down an empty street.

‘Where did these come from?’

‘Whoever did this, thank you!’

‘Guys, I just saw the craziest thing last night …’

‘I could slow down just in time.’

‘I was speeding home from my night shift but …’

Every morning, Naina (as I call my father in Telugu) phoned from work to check which newspapers had featured us. Every evening, he returned with the print copy and put it in a file. The file grew very fat very quickly.

‘I am sure Mr Tata would like to know about Motopaws. He likes dogs,’ Naina mentioned in a suspiciously nonchalant way one day.

‘Yes, I think he does,’ I replied, based on whatever little I knew of Mr Tata’s interests.

But I humoured him: ‘Do you have his email?’

‘No, but I could ask around.’

I didn’t know if he forgot, but after some very cursory internet searches, I surely did. Not because reaching out to him successfully was insignificant, but because it was too significant a thing, and I couldn’t comprehend it happening.

Everyone looks up to the house of Tatas. Everyone dreams of meeting him. Every other Indian. What was so different about me? There must be a sea of phenomenal minds more deserving of an audience with him. I was a speck.

My family didn’t just look up to him like every other person familiar with the phrase ‘Tata–Birla’. We worshipped the Tatas as a foundational part of our family history.

My great-grandfather worked for Tata Power. My grandfather for Tata Electrical. Naina for Tata Motors. My cousin for Tata Consultancy. And then me for Tata Elxsi, making me the fifth generation in the Tata Group.

No, we had never met or interacted with any of the Tatas. None of us had been Tata executives either. The Tata history has no mention of us Naidus. We worked in whatever roles we were found deserving of, largely just engineers, and we were proud of that heritage. My great-grandmother (now ninety) has a silver embossed coin featuring Jamshedji Tata in the house shrine, next to a picture of him before which she lights incense sticks every evening, alongside idols of seven different gods and a naked baby picture of me that remains there despite repeated protests. She believes the Tatas are god-sent world-fixers. I would be lying if I said the rest of the family didn’t feel the same way.

So, no, I refused to believe I would see Mr Tata. I chose self-doubt and self-deprecation instead. Until Naina sat me down one day with the big fat file of news clippings.

‘Someone I know was part of the legal team at the Tata Trusts. Maybe we can send this with him?’

Like an emotional teenager, I spent a long time writing him a letter that ended with: ‘Someday, I would very much like to see you, Mr Tata.’ All that was missing was XOXO, hearts and hugs. It was hard not to mock my own audacity to even think the universe would oblige such a request. I attached the Tata newsletters talking about Motopaws and pictures of the young team.

With the letter carefully put in the file, and an introduction from Naina, I went to the lawyer. The second domino.

‘If you could just give this to his office …’ I said, not even having the guts to add, ‘to Mr Tata.’

He agreed to drop it off at his office the next time he went to Mumbai, but nothing more.

I was happy that I tried. If nothing happened now, it would be okay. The pain of wondering about the what-ifs is harsher than the pains of rejection. The next week the lawyer told me the file had been delivered.

If the hope of something actually coming out of this was described with the analogy of a fire (channelling my tragic inner poet here), it was the size of a huge forest fire the day he said it had been delivered. With passing weeks, it reduced to a bonfire, a fireplace fire, then a flickering lamp and, finally, a firefly’s butt.

I told Naina to let it go. That the letter was probably lost in the many million things that are sent to him. Or that he couldn’t possibly respond to something like this. Naina, however, had a resolve I simply could not understand. He spoke with confidence as if he were his childhood friend Ratan.

‘He will reply. If he sees it, he will reply. He has not seen it yet.’

Weeks passed by. I was studying for the GMAT, the entrance exam for an MBA abroad. Naina had given me the option of becoming an industrial designer or doing an MBA and I chose the latter for its financial safety (there is no such thing). I was really into it.

We used to have this ‘He will reply’ and ‘I don’t think so’ exchange every now and then during my study breaks, with the occasional variety of:

‘He cares about everyone who writes to him.’

‘Tatas don’t ignore people.’

‘Even if he doesn’t meet you, he will write back.’

‘The newspapers say he is in Germany now. Let him return, then you’ll see.’

Two hundred miles away, at Mr Tata’s office at the Elphinstone building in south Mumbai, the file was looked at by the girl at the front desk. She knew all such files went to a particular person in the office who had shown no particular interest in looking at things empathetically. But not this file. She held on to this one. She showed it to the other two women working there, and all three of them decided that it must be seen by Mr Tata himself. They protected it and waited. When Mr Tata returned, the file was on his desk. In the many dominoes on my journey to meeting Mr Tata, these three women were critical. The final domino.

Shortly after, there was a letter from Mumbai:

Dear Shantanu,

Thank you for your email and for the kind sentiments which you have expressed.

I am impressed by your dedicated efforts in successfully launching the innovative campaign ‘Motopaws’ and I am also pleased to know about the campaign ‘Paws for a Cause’. Animal welfare is an area which I am very passionate about. It would be a pleasure meeting you for discussions on this subject. Please get in touch with my office for a suitable date for our meeting.

With regards and my best wishes in your endeavour,

Yours sincerely,

Ratan N. Tata

See, when a multi-generational Tata employee family receives a letter like this, the celebrations are nothing short of running naked in the streets. Here are a few things that were repeated multiple times in a very short span that day by the Naidu family, with the kind of giddiness that can only come from a childhood sugar rush.

‘Did you see! He said he is IMPRESSED!! MR TATA is impressed with MY son!!!’

‘HE SIGNED IT HIMSELF!!’

‘You are going to meet A TATA!!!’

‘Our ancestors would be so proud.’

The meeting was set for two months later, in September 2016. Those were not pleasant months. The Motopaws collars started cracking. The reflective tape we used was meant for cars and flat surfaces and not for stitching on denims. It couldn’t handle the circular stresses. We researched deeper, and we researched thoroughly, and we finally replaced it with an industrial retro-reflective fabric that worked wonders and fixed the issue. To this day, we use the same material, despite the severe damage to our pockets, to ensure the quality and sustainability of Motopaws collars.

The meeting was drawing close, with only a couple of weeks to go. One monsoon evening, I was riding my motorcycle when it started to pour heavily. I decided not to pull over to wait out the storm and kept riding home. Suddenly, another rider emerged, completely blindsiding me. I hit the front brakes in panic, sending me into the road divider. The bike dragged me with it.

My leg wouldn’t move. I was bleeding from more than one place. In the middle of the street, as the storm continued, I sat myself up, thinking of only one thing:

‘How am I now going to see Mr Tata?’

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Acknowledgements

WHEN I MET MR Tata for the first time, Amma gave me a little red diary to write down everything in. She worried that as time went by, my memories of all the meetings with him would become less detailed, fade and might even disappear. Naina encouraged this, of course, and said, ‘Some day you will have to tell the world about them.’ So yes, let me start with my parents. Without their nudges, this book wouldn’t even come into existence.

Then comes Mr Tata, who in no way pulled me back or asked me to change a thing in this endeavour. As much as it was an exercise in vulnerability for me, it was for him too, but he gracefully obliged, and I cannot thank him enough for his trust in me.

Then come the people who believed in its existence. My three lovely colleagues—Deepthi, Parizaad and Denese—who egged me on; my illustrator, Sanjana, for bringing it alive with her heart-warming art; my dog Winter, for just being himself and making me believe in the world; and of course the small close circle of friends that caught me falling and helped me stand up straight again. And finally the wonderful team at HarperCollins, especially Siddhesh and Saurav, for putting up with the relentless changes back and forth, and for offering their honest effort to make the book what it is.

I cannot thank you enough.

A Note About the Illustrator

WHEN I WAS IN one of the darkest phases of my life, I met Sanjana through her art. I had given up believing in a lot of different emotions, but Sanjana, with her ever-sweet and empathetic heart, rescued me by giving my stories an ear when nobody else would. It has now been four years that she has listened to and witnessed many of the stories that I have narrated in these pages. And she has always communicated and decorated my words through her illustrations—the true heart of this book—bringing my stories to life and making me believe that they are even worth telling at all. The one thing that I feel—that everyone feels—about her work is that it captures heart, and I think that comes from how pure her own heart is. It is a blessing to have her as a part of this book, of my life. I am sure everyone else who knows her feels that way too. I am sure she has an exciting journey ahead, distributing much-needed grace while illustrating one story at a time.

Thank you, Sanjana.

—Shantanu Naidu

About the Book

An endearing portrait of an Indian legend

I told him that when I write a book, I would write about another side of him and not just historic events or business milestones. I would write about us and our adventures together, and how I saw him, colours and shades of him unknown to the world. Life beyond the great steel wall of ‘industry doyen’.

He agreed. ‘There cannot be one book that captures everything … So you do your thing, give your perspective.’

It was their shared empathy for homeless dogs that sparked an unlikely friendship. In 2014, Shantanu Naidu, an automobile design engineer in his early twenties, developed an innovation to save the local strays from being run over by speeding cars. Ratan Tata, himself known for his compassion for stray dogs, took note. Impressed, he not only decided to invest in the venture but over the years became a mentor, boss and an unexpectedly dear friend to Shantanu.

I Came Upon a Lighthouse is an honest, light-hearted telling of this uncommon bond between a millennial and an octogenarian that gives glimpses of a beloved Indian icon in a warm light.

About the Author

FROM COMPOSING MUSIC VIDEOS for social causes during his engineering days, Shantanu Naidu went on to establish himself in animal welfare with his video ‘Paws for a cause’, which was his entry into the space. During his time as automotive design engineer at Tata Elxsi, he founded a start-up, Motopaws, to put reflective collars on India’s stray dogs to prevent nighttime road accidents. Mr Ratan Tata became a primary investor in the venture.

After Shantanu’s return to India from his MBA at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he spent time diving deep into entrepreneurship, he joined Mr Tata’s office as Deputy General Manager, assisting him with day-to-day activities, including philanthropic initiatives, start-up proposals and social media.

During his time at Mr Tata’s office, Shantanu found a huge gap in young students’ understanding and fear of entrepreneurship and founded ‘On Your Sparks’, an online entrepreneurship course teaching fundamentals through stories, the proceeds of which are used for animal welfare. He has also founded the ‘Cyber Aid Army’, which helps victims of cybercrime technologically and through counselling, free of charge.

Shantanu spends most of his time with dogs and engaging students online, coming up with the next best idea or talking about his love for pina coladas and Mumbai.

To know more about the author and illustrator, please visit:

Shantanu Naidu: https://linktr.ee/shantanunaidu

Sanjana Desai: http://linktr.ee/sanjanadesai

Ratan Tata and Shantanu Naidu

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First published in India in 2021 by

HarperCollins Publishers

A-75, Sector 57, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201301, India

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2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Copyright © Shantanu Naidu 2021

Illustrations copyright © Sanjana Desai 2021

P-ISBN: 978-93-9032-752-2

Epub Edition © December 2020 ISBN: 978-93-9032-753-9

The views and opinions expressed in this book are the author’s own and the facts are as reported by him, and the publishers are not in any way liable for the same.

The names and identifying details of some people who feature in the book have been changed to protect their privacy/identity.

Shantanu Naidu asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved under The Copyright Act, 1957. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers India.

Cover design: HarperCollins Publishers India

Cover illustration Sanjana Desai

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