Farewell Russi Mody

They don’t make men like Russi Mody any more. The legendary icon of Jamshedpur and Kolkata was almost universally acknowledged as a manager of men and businesses par excellence, in addition with an unrivalled wit and sense of humour, a voracious appetite for a 16-egg omelette and an enviable skill at the piano. It is said he had the rare privilege of playing the piano with Albert Einstein on the violin at Oxford, where he was head of Oxford Majilis. Son of Sir Homi Mody (after whom is named the road on which Bombay House, the Tata headquarters, is situated) and Lady Jerbai Mody, he was sent to Britain aged nine and studied at Harrow and Oxford.

One can only speculate that if he had the Tata surname rather than Mody, the gregarious Russi would have been chairman of the Tata Group. He joined Tisco (Tata Iron and Steel Co, as it was then known) at 21 and retired as its chairman at 75, the beloved head of its dedicated workforce. But he was made of different “steel” than what the legendary JRD, the patriarch of Bombay House, had envisaged the future chairman of the group should be.

Russi Mody had also reached the age of 75, which under the new rules at Bombay House had excluded many a Tata satrap from continuing to head the highly successful companies they had built up.  It is a great loss to the history of business in India that Russi has not written his memoirs.