J R D Tata belonged to that rare breed of industrialists who hide little and are willing to open their lives to scrutiny. A score of books were written on him while he was alive and the momentum only picked up after he died in a hospital in Geneva in 1993 aged 89. While some of these books were commissioned by the Tatas, the others were independent accounts of his life. All that had to be said about JRD had been said. Finer details like his service in the French Army, his fetish to offer a lift to three people on the roads everyday have all been well documented and are now part of the country’s corporate folklore. 

There was nothing left to add. A pall of scepticism was looming over me when I picked up JRD Tata Letters. But it evaporated as soon as I turned the first page. For, I was entering a hitherto unexplored world, a new facet of JRD’s persona: the man of letters. The burden of being the country’s topmost industrialist and a crusader (often lonely) for a free economy notwithstanding, JRD wrote furiously and, what is more, beautifully. 

The elegance is unmistakably JRD—witty, self-deprecating yet honest. Fortunately, JRD lived in an age when the art of letter-writing was still alive. This meant not only putting fountain on paper but also preserving letters in folders in the attic to be dusted and read fondly every once in a while. The practice is all but gone now. Computers and cellphones have brutally killed letter writing. The personal touch of letters has given way to the dryness of e-mails and the crudity of SMS messages. 

While much of JRD’s correspondence was lying in Bombay House, the Tata Group headquarters in downtown Mumbai, the personal letters were discovered in his house after his death. The letters have been very neatly arranged in various sections, starting from his childhood when he wrote to his parents. His short letters to his French mother Soonie (she was born Suzanne) and his long and often mischievous letters to his father R D Tata are definitely the most engaging part of the whole collection. 

The wit, energy, and compassion, which were to become JRD’s hallmark during his adult years, are all there for the reader to see. Some of these letters were written in French but have been translated into English without any distortions. The firm hand is unmistakable in young JRD’s writings. JRD’s long life straddling different stages in the development of the country: from a colony of the British to a command economy and finally a free market economy. But he was an early convert to the spirit of free enterprise. 

His letters show that he was convinced that a public sector-led economy was doomed right from day one. He was also the first to spot trends in business before they happened. (TCS, Asia’s largest software services company and a brainchild of JRD and his trusted aide Fakir Chand Kohli, was born in the early 1970s.) Of course, no JRD story can be complete without a mention of his love for flying. Fortunately, some letters in the collection tell the whole story of how he set up Air-India. 

More than anything else, it was a victory for JRD’s daring spirit. Several years before modern landing equipment could be fitted in the country’s aerodromes, JRD and his handful of pilots were carrying mail all over India. There were accidents and lives were lost but nothing could curb JRD’s determination. JRD was more than just a great businessman and a fearless and adventurous pilot. He had great respect for men of learning and would do all he could to help such people grow. 

His association with ignited minds like Homi J Bhabha and Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan is well known. But it is only after reading their correspondence that you realise how deep the mutual admiration ran. Then there were the common folks—youngsters who wanted to follow into his footsteps, people stuck in mid-life crises, and women who had been denied jobs in Tata companies. JRD found time to write to each one of them. The tone was never condescending or hectoring. The note of sincerity was always present in his advice. 

Only bad English seems to have irritated him. His own letters were corrected by JRD several times before they were sealed and posted. The other section is a collection of his speeches delivered either at public functions or at meetings of Tata directors and shareholders. These again read like his letters —elegant and honest. Clearly, there was only one facet of JRD’s persona. Not for him a public face reflected in his speeches and a private face that came up in his letters. JDR talked sensibly, though he talked straight from the heart. 

For instance, he often spoke of how Pandit Nehru turned cold towards him after Independence when JRD, the architect of the Bombay Plan, had made a case for free economy, while Nehru was pressing ahead with his plans of Fabian Socialism. He spoke of it freely in his speeches even at times when it was considered politically incorrect to utter a word against the dynasty. But it was all said in such a good-humoured way that nobody could ever have taken umbrage. That is what made JRD special. Sadly, much like letter writing, the art of speech making too is on oxygen.