Ratan Tata is not your typical titan of industry. He is softly-spoken, his faint American accent a legacy of his time studying architecture at Cornell University in the early 1960s. And he is shy, known to dislike public appearances.
A bachelor, he lives frugally in the same Mumbai beachfront apartment he has shared with his dogs for 20 years. He is driven to work in an ordinary Tata saloon, but he is a pilot and has his own jet for the foreign travel his company increasingly requires.
He spent nearly 30 years working in various outposts of the Tata empire and replaced his uncle as chairman in 1991.
His €8.8 billion purchase of Corus, formerly British Steel, last year is his biggest business coup to date, but he combines hard-headed capitalism with a sense of social responsibility. Some 60 per cent of profits go to charitable trusts, and the benefits for Tata's 300,000 employees are good enough to have prevented strikes for 50 years. The low-cost Nano, pictured right, was the result of his mission to get ordinary Indian families off overladen, unsafe motorcycles and rickshaws and into a modern, safe but affordable "four-wheeler".
He set his engineers the target of building it for 100,000 rupees. Now 70, Ratan insists that he will quit at 75. But there is no heir apparent in the group.