- Lived:
- 29 July 1904, Paris → Bombay (Mumbai), with a lifetime of air miles in between; died Geneva, 29 November 1993
- Field:
- industry and aviation — chairman of the Tata group for fifty-three years, founder of India's first airline
- The Big Idea:
- A business house can be run as a public trust — flying the mail yourself, holding the profits in charitable trusts, and founding hospitals, laboratories and schools as deliberately as factories.
- In their words:
- asked late in life what he wanted India to become, he refused "economic superpower" and answered with three words — "a happy country."
- If you remember one thing:
- The man who flew India's first commercial flight with the mail sack beside him spent the next sixty years proving that the point of an empire is what it builds for people who will never own a share of it.