COIMBATORE: A quiet and obedient boy from a village in Namakkal district has been named to lead India’s one of the oldest multinational conglomerate.
This line summarises Natarajan Chandrasekaran’s life from Mohanur to Mumbai, from the local Government School to CIT, from REC to TCS and now from CEO of TCS to chairman of Tata group.
“He is a very simple man. Even back when he was studying at the Mohanur Government School, he never let anything come in the way of how he interacted with everyone,” recalls G Ajeethan, one of Chandrasekharan’s cousins.
Chandrasekaran comes from an illustrious and religious family at Mohanur village, 20 kms away from Namakkal town. He grandfather is said to have established the Mohanur Primary Agricultural Co-operative Bank.
KS Natarajan, 72-year-old retired teacher and Chandrasekaran’s teacher in seventh grade remembers how brilliant and obedient a student was Chandrasekaran.
“His favourite subject was science. During the holidays, he used to spend time playing at my home with his companions,” says Natarajan.
They also remember his passion for cricket.
Two years Chandrasekaran’s junior, P Narendran, 51-year-old, says that it is a proud moment that a person from their village is leading such a big group.
“During his 10th standard, Chandra was the team captain of our cricket team and I was the vice-captain. He was different from the others in the way he dealt with certain issues. He was dedicated and valued honest friends. I had known it back then somehow that he would achieve great heights,” says Narendran.
According to Narendran the new chairman of the Tata Group is a man with a good sense of humour too.
Ajeethan says that when Chandra had called him a few days back, he had asked about him getting the Tata chairman post.
“He simply smiled at it and said nothing. That is Chandra, he is simple and dedicated and stubborn when he sets his mind on to something, and he gets it done,” says Ajeethan.
Chandra is the third son of S Natrarajan Iyer, who was an advocate at the Madras High Court, but left the practice to take up farming.
Chandra has two older brothers- Sreenivasan, who is the group finance director at E.I.D-Parry India Limited and Ganapathy Subramanian, who is the chief operating officer at TCS.
He has three younger siblings-Rajalakshmi, who lives in Erode, Gayatri, who lives in Bengaluru and Narthangi, who lives in Chennai.
His wife Lakshmi Parvathy is a former senior manager at Kotak Mahindra Bank. She had resigned from the position to move to Mumbai with her husband. They have a 19-year-old son, Pranav, who is pursuing his studies at Yale University.
According to Ajeethan, Chandra belonged to the first batch of students at Mohanur School. After completing his studies at the school in Mohanur, Chandra had applied for engineering at the Coimbatore Institute of Technology. However, he could not get through the process of selection and took up BSc Applied Science at CIT.
Once he completed the course he joined Regional Engineering College (NIT) in Trichy, where he was in the first batch of MCA.
After finishing his MCA in 1983, Chandra joined as a system analyser at TCS and there began the journey that culminated with the chairmanship.