Alan Rosling came to India from the UK with a backpack when he was 20. Then he kept coming back. Finally, six years ago, he simply moved here lock, stock and barrel.  

The beginning of this crossover tale lies, innocuously enough, in a course Mr Rosling took on India as a student at Cambridge. Bridging the distance in his mind tempted the youngster and three of his friends to do the same in the physical world. In 1982, they visited Shimla, Amritsar, Kashmir, Leh, Varanasi, Agra and Delhi over a two-month period.

“This trip was a great way to grow up,” recalls the executive director of Tata Sons, who joined the group in July 2004. “We stayed in some fairly grotty hotels, travelled second-class on trains and on rickety buses, and we met crooks, charlatans, phony holy men, beggars, and thieves, apart from some wonderful people.” Three years later, before heading off to Harvard for an MBA, Mr Rosling was drawn back to see the southern part of the country and Rajasthan.

This predilection towards India eventually cemented into an enduring equation when, in 1990, good old Indian destiny prompted Mr Rosling towards Sarmila Bose, an Indian from Kolkata who was also at Harvard. Since then filial connections have brought them back more and more. Now both stay at Mumbai along with their three boys, aged 3, 7 and 11. 

To this student of history, it must be interesting to be one of the many ways in which the courses of two countries have continued to crisscross for so many years. It must also be interesting to see how personal paths intersect with larger historical, political or economic ones.

The far east
Mr Rosling has had many trysts with geographical and cultural barriers and, taken together, they make for a lifetime of anecdotes. He recalls walking into Tibet from Nepal and then hitching to Lhasa. “A cousin of mine, who trekked with us from Kathmandu, could speak Chinese. At the border post, when we were asked for a permit, he incited the official by saying he thought Tibet was a part of China. But the official stamped the passport.

"We got a lift from the People’s Liberation Army in a truck. They stopped for the night at some barracks. There was no power, so in the dark I followed them to the dormitory, slipped into a bunk and went to sleep. In the morning, I realised I was in the women's barrack. As you can imagine, I was told to get out of there very fast.” 

Mr Rosling's most memorable journey was made from Kowloon, Hong Kong, to Worplesdon, the local station near his home in Britain, entirely by train and three ferries. He travelled for two months and stopped at various places, among them Mongolia, Siberia, Moscow, Scandinavia, Germany and Holland, before finally arriving in the UK.

“While we were crossing the border between China and Mongolia, Russians came in to check what we were carrying. I had two books, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carre and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Ironically enough, they let me keep the first because it had a big hammer and sickle on the cover and confiscated the latter, probably on the assumption that it may be about some new way of escaping from Russia on a spacecraft!” 

Mr Rosling is an avid reader, especially while he is travelling. He is particularly partial to historical fiction and has grown up on a staple of tales of the Royal British Navy and the Napoleonic Wars. In these, too, he has not failed to miss the Indian connection. Some of the ships of the time were built in Bombay. “If India and Britain had not intermingled, the Royal Navy would have been different.” 

Predictably, then, Indophilia forms a large part of his reading: John Masters, former ICS officer Philip Mason’s autobiography, William Dalrymple, and Cambridge professor of Indian history Chris Bailey’s Making of the Modern World, which he recently finished.

His favourite Indian fiction writer in English is Amitav Ghosh. For someone whose intellectual life transcends borders, this seems appropriate. As a character in Ghosh’s Shadow Lines says, "Why don't they draw thousands of little lines through the whole subcontinent and give every little piece a new name? What would it change?"

India and China
Even then, Mr Rosling has a clear affinity for one part of the world than others. After his first trip to India, he went to China with one of the earlier three companions. “In those parallel trips, it was interesting to compare the two countries, which had the same GDP at the time. China was a closed communist regime and India had not opened up.

"But, in Beijing, the university where we stayed had one person from the anti-foreigners league on each floor to prevent us contacting ordinary Chinese. I found the democracy in India more attractive. In most parts of China the language is Chinese or Mandarin. But you may have 20 languages in one region in India. While the east coast of China has a wonderful culture, it is intrinsically less varied that India. 

"This country has everything: religion, history, mountains and deserts. As an Englishman, the 400 years of interaction between the two countries that shaped both England and India were very fascinating for me. So, even though I found some aspects of India difficult, there were others I loved.” 

Now he also spends a lot of time viewing the country through his children’s eyes. They love the forests, mountains, tigers, lions and elephants.  “We have been to places like Gir, Ranthambore and Kanha. We visited Darjeeling for Christmas and saw five of the top ten mountains from Tiger Hill.” 

But it is not only the beauty around that the children notice. Mr Rosling’s kids ask him awkward questions about inequality and poverty. “How do you explain these to them? The macroeconomic numbers do not mean anything when you see a child with a gangrenous leg lying unattended on the street. It makes you think about what we can do personally to make a difference. Do you give money to a beggar, contribute to an NGO, give your time, or do you work for the Tatas, where wealth goes back to community?” 

Going west
Being at the centre of the Tata Group at this juncture is rewarding for more reasons than one. "Exciting things are happening with our efforts to take our businesses global," he explains. "My task is to help companies make choices in implementing the chairman's call for globalisation. Informally, I also represent a different business culture and share some of its characteristics that may have relevance." 

Mr Rosling was associated with the Tata Group even before he joined it. As chairman of the Jardine Matheson Group, India, he served as a director on the boards of Tata Industries and Tata Automotive Components. He was also managing director of Concorde Motors, a joint venture between Jardine Motors and the Tata Group, prior to the sale of the Jardine stake to the Tatas in 2002.

Interestingly, the history of his earlier company, Jardine Matheson, has an India link. Jardine and Matheson started it with Parsi venture capital money. “Jardine and Jeejibhoy met on an East India ship on which Jardine was surgeon and the latter a passenger. This ship was captured by a French frigate and shipwrecked. This is how the two 21-year-olds were thrown together and became friends. Almost 20 years later, the same Indian friend provided the money he had earned with the export of opium from India to China for the business and even handled the Indian part of it."  

Ask him if he sees himself as part of the continuum in which the histories of the two countries collide time and again, and Mr Rosling quips, “Things are a bit different now; we don't trade in drugs!”

Uploaded on September 16, 2004