You cannot miss the Tata brand name in India. It's on the tea you drink, the ubiquitous white Indica taxis that ferry you around, the trucks that block your way and it's beginning to be seen on Tata Starbucks outlets.
The Tata brand is also stamped on hotels in New York and Sydney, on steel made in European factories and luxury Jaguar cars.
The man behind the global name, Ratan Naval Tata, turns 75 Friday and steps down as chairman of Tata Sons, the holding company of the 100-billion-dollar group headquartered in Mumbai.
India's largest privately owned conglomerate has businesses spanning steel, hotels, tea, automobiles, fertilizers, energy, telecommunications and information services.
When Tata took over as chairman of the 123-year-old group in 1991 from his uncle JRD Tata, it was an unwieldy assortment of more than 200 firms, some of them run by powerful satraps answerable only to the elder Tata.
With a degree in architecture from Cornell University, another from Harvard Business School and years on Tata company shopfloors behind him, he spent the first decade of his chairmanship shedding companies he saw as old wood and consolidating the group.
Tata never lost sight of what he saw as the core values of his group. "We should ease out certain sectors but do it in a dignified way that protects our employees and all our stakeholders," he said in a 2006 interview published on the group's website.
When Tata took over as chairman, India had just started liberalizing its economy. After consolidation at home, Tata set about making his group the first truly global Indian company.
Among the acquisitions made by the Tata Group in the 2000-12 period were Britain's tea-making Tetley group; the heavy vehicles unit of South Korea's Daewoo Motors; Singapore's largest steel company, NatSteel; hotels in New York, San Francisco and Sydney; and Britain-based chemicals manufacturer Brunner Mond.
But the biggest were the Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus, bought by Tata Steel for 11.3 billion dollars in 2007, and the Jaguar and Land Rover (JLR) brands acquired by Tata Motors from Ford Motor Co for 2.3 billion dollars in 2008.
In the 21 years under Tata's leadership, the group has grown to operations in 80 countries with 450,000 employees.
And in the financial year that ended March 31, about 58 per cent of its revenues came from abroad, a first for an Indian company.
"[The] acquisition of JLR alone is enough to give him a place in the business history books," Rahul Bajaj, the chairman of the Indian conglomerate Bajaj Group, said of Tata's transformation of the group's automotive sector.
Tata insiders and his peers in Indian business said he is a man in tune with the times, ready to take risks, with a vision for his group and a passion for the smallest detail.
Today, Tata Motors, which started out making locomotives, is among the top five commercial vehicle manufacturers in the world.
Tata Steel is among the top 10 steelmakers, Tata Global Beverages is the world's second-largest tea company and Tata Chemicals is the world's second-largest manufacturer of soda ash.
"Ratan Tata occupies the well-deserved iconic status of a man who has taken the group from a largely Indian family-owned business house into a professionally managed global conglomerate," said Rajkumar Dhoot, president of the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India
The group has had its share of challenges and controversies under Tata. It had to shift a factory for the Nano - a cheap, everyman's car, which is a project close to his heart - from West Bengal state after protesters alleged wrongful acquisition of farmland.
Tata Telecom was embroiled in a scandal related to allegedly irregular allocation of telecommunications spectrum licences in 2008 but was later cleared by investigators.
Yet, in the often murky world of corporate India, the Tata companies are known for their ethical business practices.
"It requires a lot of courage and guts to remain steadfast in a business environment which we find is often mired in controversies," Dhoot said.
In 2008, the group adopted a code of conduct for its companies and employees, which states: "No Tata company shall undertake any project or activity to the detriment of the wider interests of the communities in which it operates."
In many ways, Tata the man embodies that code. Low-key and understated, the bachelor lives in a modest apartment in Mumbai.
He was expected to focus on the group's philanthropic work next. At least two-thirds of Tata Sons' shares have been transferred to non-profit foundations.
Tata's successor is Cyrus Mistry, 44, whose family owns a 16.5-per-cent stake in Tata Sons.