BOOK EXTRACT. I Mahadevan — a catalyst in Titan’s founding

I ravatham Mahadevan, 88, one of the world’s leading scholars on the Indus Valley and the Tamil Brahmi scripts, passed away in Chennai on November 26. As an IAS officer of the Tamil Nadu cadre and a former Chairman and Managing Director of the Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation, Mahadevan played a key role of a catalyst in the founding of Titan Co Ltd, a jewel in the crown of both the Tata group and TIDCO. The following is an extract from an upcoming book on Titan which documents Mahadevan’s role. The late Xerxes Desai, who would be the first MD of Titan, and Anil Manchanda, Vice-President, Business Development, both in Tata Press in the 1970s, were looking for a new project to diversify into but didn’t make much headway. Till Mahadevan came into their lives.

Extract

It was at this juncture, in the late 1970s, that the extraordinary bureaucrat-scholar Iravatham Mahadevan came into the picture. At that time, Mahadevan, an IAS officer of the Tamil Nadu cadre, was a joint secretary in the Ministry of Industrial Development in New Delhi. That apart, he was a Jawaharlal Nehru scholar on leave from the IAS, studying the Indus Script and using the computing facilities and expertise at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai to analyse the complete collection of discovered texts with a view towards printing and publishing it as a concordance (a comprehensive appearance-based alphabetical list). The computerised analysis was nearing completion and Mahadevan was at his wit’s end trying to locate a printer who could handle an unknown and unreadable script. One day, Dr Mathai Joseph who headed the computer science department at TIFR and was a friend of Xerxes’s wife Rajani, called Xerxes and asked if Tata Press would like to take a look at it.

‘Sure, tell him to come and talk to Anil and me,’ Xerxes replied. Anil had been working with mainframe computers since 1964 while still a student at the Indian Statistical Institute and had also worked earlier with the TIFR team. Tata Press was at this time also printing the Bombay telephone directory from magnetic tapes created by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). It was quickly established that TIFR could generate the Indus Script texts on magnetic tapes coded to suit Tata Press requirements. The problem was that there were no fonts to print the script. While the Alphatype equipment used by Tata Press was the finest available, it wasn’t smart enough to tell the Indus Script apart from the English language for which it was designed. Anil assigned the task of finding a solution to K.P. Rao, a self-taught electronics tinkerer who, working with the studio and art departments of Tata Press, was able to develop the appropriate fonts. They then produced photo positives directly from the computer tapes, ready for printing on offset machines.

‘That was a breakthrough of sorts because no one else had figured it out till then,’ recalls Anil during a long conversation in the old-worldly environs of the Bangalore Club in Bengaluru. ‘I spent many late nights at TIFR after my regular work to ensure that what they produced would talk to our machines. The fact that TIFR’s food supplier, Air India’s hotel subsidiary Hotel Corporation of India, served five-star stuff at Udupi-restaurant prices was a great help. In good time we were ready to print and did some test runs. Our people had, of course, no idea how to proofread it. That monumental burden eventually fell entirely on Mahadevan.’

While the process was under way there wasn’t much for Mahadevan to do, so he resumed work in Delhi. The printing project took over six months, during which time Mahadevan was a frequent visitor to Tata Press. One day, over a lunch of sandwiches and tea, Xerxes and Anil mentioned to Mahadevan their hitherto unsuccessful search for a new project. ‘Look, why doesn’t Anil come up to Delhi and we will help you identify some projects that the Tatas could consider,’ said Mahadevan.

The offer was accepted almost before he had completed his sentence, and as soon as Mahadevan went back, Anil set off for New Delhi. For three days he parked himself on a sofa in Mahadevan’s cavernous office in Udyog Bhavan while a steady stream of visitors went in and out of the room. The drearily furnished office was enlivened by endless cups of excellent coffee from the canteen run by India Coffee House and the gossip and chatter of bureaucrats at work. ‘In between Mahadevan’s other tasks,’ Anil recalls, ‘we discussed various projects. I showed interest in four or five areas, and Mahadevan called [in] his people from various departments with their files and I pored over the data, which were basically industry snapshots.’ There were reports for all kinds of projects, from ophthalmic glass to granite tombstones to mechanized fishing boats. And then there were watches. According to an introductory note penned by Xerxes for the Titan staff newsletter, on the fourth day, 21 March 1977, at about 10 p.m., Anil phoned Xerxes and laid out the options. ‘There are five projects I’ve shortlisted. The best among them is watches,’ he said.

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When the Xerxes-Anil duo plumped for watches as their next line of business, Mahadevan, who happened to be the chairman of a task force on the watch manufacturing industry, supported the choice. However, there was a small problem: the manufacture of watches was reserved for the small-scale sector. While government-owned large public-sector units were also allowed to make watches, large private-sector groups such as the Tatas were not allowed to enter watch manufacture under the existing rules. Anil clarifies that the socialist economic policies of the government of the day sought to control the means of production and generate employment. Therefore, in such a climate, it was the public sector and small-scale entrepreneurs who were given a boost. Mahadevan, however, did not concur with this policy and felt that the Tatas could try to have it overturned.

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During this transition period, Tata Press’s ambitions to be a watchmaker remained in the doldrums. But fortune came to the rescue once again in the shape of Iravatham Mahadevan who, in September 1979, was posted as chairman and managing director of Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation (TIDCO). As Xerxes recounted, ‘One day he [Mahadevan] called me from Madras. He had just discovered that TIDCO had been in dialogue with a French movement manufacturer, France Ebauches, but was yet to find a joint-venture partner to execute [its watch-making] project, and would Tata Press be interested. And, of course, we were!’

Xerxes and Anil went to Madras to meet with Mahadevan, who said he was glad that Tata Press was still interested in making watches. Before he took over as managing director of TIDCO, the industry promotion body had sounded out a few local industrial houses to partner with them, with no success. At the meeting, Mahadevan called in the project manager in charge of watches, told him of the Tata interest and requested him to brief Xerxes and Anil and to hand over the project files for them to study.

Over two days – in swimming trunks, reclining on beach loungers at the Fisherman’s Cove, a Taj luxury property 50 km from the city – Xerxes and Anil pored over the project papers. At the end of the second day, their decision was unanimous: ‘Yes, let’s do it!’ Now in his 80s, Mahadevan, who resides in a suburb of Chennai, is self-effacing about his role in the project. ‘I encouraged the project on merit and didn’t tie it [up] in red tape,’ he says. ‘While I did my best to get Titan off the ground, it was my successors who as MDs of TIDCO took the project forward.’

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Excerpted from Titan: Inside India’s Most Successful Consumer Brand by Vinay Kamath, Associate Editor, BusinessLine, with permission from Hachette India. The book will be released later this month

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