Rare photos reveal start of Ratan Tata's journey

As Ratan Tata, who has lead the Tata group for more than 20 years, steps down from chairmanship, we take a snapshot of his illustrious life through the lens of photographer Gopal Shetty.

Click NEXT to see some rare photos of Ratan Tata...

Ratan Tata is the adoptive great-grandson of Tata group founder Jamshedji Tata. His father, Naval Tata, had been adopted from the family of a distant relative by Jamshedji's childless younger son, also named Ratan Tata, and his wife Navajbai.

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Tata's parents (Naval and his first wife Sooni) separated in the mid-1940s, when Ratan was seven and his younger brother Jimmy was five years old.

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The current Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong was the deputy prime minister during the visit to Tata showroom in Mumbai in early 1990s. Photographer Gopal Shetty was a stringer with Reuters and remembers Loong saying, "India is liberalising at a time when the road is very crowded, while Singapore liberalised when the entire road was empty".

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Ratan Tata and his brother were raised by their grandmother Lady Navajbai. Many years later, Naval Tata took a second wife, Simone, and fathered another son, Noel Tata.

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Ratan Tata began his schooling in Mumbai at Campion School, then Shimla's Bishop Cotton School and finished at Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai.

He completed BS in architecture with structural engineering from Cornell University in 1962, and the Advanced Management Program from Harvard Business School in 1975.