- *Ratan Tata ...* *In His Own Words !* “I had a happy childhood, but as my brother & I got older, we faced ragging because of our parent’s divorce, which in those days wasn’t as common. My grandmom brought us up. "Soon after, when my mother remarried, the boys at school started saying all kinds of things about us. But our grandmother taught us to retain dignity at all costs, a value that’s always stayed with me. It involved walking away from these situations instead of fighting back. "And if it weren’t for grandmom, I wouldn’t be half the person I am today. "My father and I couldn’t agree on the same thing – I wanted to go to college in the US, he insisted on UK. I wanted to be an architect, he insisted on me becoming an engineer. If it weren’t for my grandmother, I wouldn’t have ended up at Cornell University in the US. It was because of her that even though I enrolled for mechanical engineering, I switched majors & graduated with a degree in architecture. M