Made in India: A Titan Story

In India, making a film/web series based on real events/people is an adventure sport. There’s no way it can criticise political powers without being selective. Real people/organisations depicted in the narrative need to sign off on permissions before one depicts them, which becomes trickier if the depiction is anything beyond heroic or idealistic. The legal departments comb through the script picking apart inane details; one might argue such films/shows are made by lawyers as much as filmmakers. No wonder most look timid and cauterised. The additional obstacle for Robbie Grewal’s Made in India: A Titan Story, adapted from Vinay Kamath’s book, Titan: Inside India’s Most Successful Consumer Brand (2018), is that it’s also partly produced by Titan.

Director Robbie Grewal’s series chronicling the origins of the Tata Empire’s iconic watch brand, for The Hollywood Reporter India. Based on Vinay Kamath’s book Titan: Inside India’s Most Successful Consumer Brand, the show follows how, through the 70s and 80s, Tata executive Xerxes Desai (Jim Sarbh) founded Titan and built a world-class watch under the guidance of JRD Tata (Naseeruddin Shah). Suchin finds the Amazon MX Player series warm, deeply felt and immensely huggable, drawing an unavoidable comparison to Rocket Boys given the shared heart-first DNA. He argues that more than a corporate success story, this is a tale framed as a fable of national pride, but one that soars because of its delicate love for its characters rather than its milestones. Across six achingly sincere episodes, he cares about the Titan story because he cares about the figures behind it.

In theory, nothing about Made In India: A Titan Story is supposed to work. Starting with that corporate-core title. It’s hard not to be wary of well-mounted business success stories about brands and institutions that still exist. There’s the thinnest line between promotional productions and historical dramas. This six-episode series is adapted from Vinay Kamath’s book about the rise of Titan, the world-class watchmaking company founded by Xerxes Desai in pre-liberalisation India. It’s not exactly a rags-to-riches tale; it opens with Desai well into his career, and already an integral part of The Tata Group. It’s not your typical underdog tale either; Desai’s mentor is grand old J.R.D Tata himself, so even when Titan runs into its many bureaucratic and funding roadblocks, it’s not like the team has the odds entirely stacked against them. There’s also the ready-made patriotism angle; Titan unfolds to put the country on a map dominated by shiny Swiss companies. On paper, the series has all the ingredients of a persuasive marketing campaign. For a viewer, it’s the equivalent of trying to root for a nepo-baby in a landscape full of outsiders.

Decades before the phrase became a sarkaari slogan, a world class product became a shining example of the dictum, Made In India. India’s first Quartz watch, Titan by the Tatas, proudly manufactured in India, for Indians, by Indians, was launched back in the late 80s. The timepiece that took on the entrenched might of old favourite HMT, and the ingrained habit of winding a knob, took its time getting there. Incorporating the setbacks and breakthroughs, it is a fascinating story of individual passion and solid teamwork, backed by the goodwill of one of India’s most powerful business houses. Under the charismatic-yet-mercurial leadership of the legendary Xerxes Desai, whose mentor was JRD himself, ‘The Titan Story’, based on Vinay Kamath’s book as an inside-look, is a saga which elicits multiple feelings: the confidence in an on-the-rise India, based on high-quality technology and best ethical practices, the demands of successful entrepreneurship, the power of an idea, the people who remained steadfast to their purpose, all wrapped up in popular Bollywood songs-driven nostalgia.

A brand’s biopic by virtue is hagiographical. Conventional wisdom says telling the story of what made a product so great without becoming its mouthpiece kind of defeats the purpose. Even the likes of Barbie or Air, showing a shrewd acumen for perception versus pop culture, cannot shrug off the weight of the legacy they’re inherently protecting. Made in India: A Titan Story chronicles the history of a homegrown brand at a time when the market was too conservative to dream big. It may not carry the nostalgia of HMT, its more iconic predecessor whose monopoly Titan founder Xerxes Desai ended with a mid-1980s collaboration between the Tata group and the Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation that gave birth to the quartz timepiece in the era of mechanical. But there’s enough of the likeability synonymous with the brand. Titan’s accessibility, appealing appearance and after sales service, boosted by a catchy advertising campaign riding high on Mozart’s Fifth Symphony, proved to be another feather in Tata’s cap.