Edition Two — a joint venture of passion and conviction, and what Titan still teaches every Indian building something
Picture the pitch.
It is the early 1980s. A man stands in a boardroom and proposes that India — a country that makes you wait two years for a scooter and longer for a telephone — will build a wristwatch fine enough to stand beside the Swiss and the Japanese. Not a cheap watch. A world-class one. Made here, by us.
Most boards would have shown him the door.
They built it anyway. And if you are one of the millions of Indians running a small business, starting up, or beginning a career with an idea no one has yet backed — this story is about you.
I watched the new series on Titan’s founding this past week, and it moved me more than I expected. I’ve spent thirty years structuring ventures like it — a private vision married to public money, the world’s companies brought into India. But the lesson I most want to pull from it is not for boardrooms. It is for you, the builder no one is funding yet.
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The idea came before the evidence. Every number available in 1980 said this would fail. No precision-manufacturing base, no brand the world respected, a market ruled by smuggled foreign watches. The data did not support the decision. Xerxes Desai and his backers — with J.R.D. Tata’s quiet belief behind them — made it anyway. Here is the point I want every young Indian to sit with: the biggest bets are placed before the evidence exists. Today you can ask AI for the most probable answer to anything, in seconds. But the most probable answer in 1980 was don’t build the watch. Every algorithm would have agreed. Data tells you what is. Conviction is what dares to build what could be.
It was capital married to conviction. Titan was a joint venture — the Tatas and a state government, two very different partners. The money mattered. But money is never what holds a venture together. I have watched well-funded partnerships collapse and shoestring ones endure, and the difference is almost always the same: shared belief. The capital you can raise. The conviction you must already have. No investor, no scheme, no spreadsheet supplies it — it is the one thing the founder brings that nothing else can replace.
They built for decades, not quarters. The factory, the quality, the trust — none of it paid off quickly. It took years of unglamorous, patient work before Titan became the name it is. In an age that worships the overnight win, this is almost a foreign language. But the things that last are still built the slow way. Your competitor with the better algorithm and the faster funding is not your real threat. The builder with deeper conviction, who simply refuses to stop, is.
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So here is what I want India’s founders, its small businesses, its young professionals to take from a watch company.
Use the data. Use the AI. They are powerful tools — use every one of them. But understand what they are: servants, not masters. They can tell you what the world already knows. They can never tell you to believe. That part — the passion, the conviction, the instinct to back your own idea when no number yet supports it — is yours alone to supply. It cannot be downloaded. It cannot be prompted. It is the most human thing you own.
Titan was not built by data. It was built by people who trusted their conviction and did the hard work to prove it right. That is the formula. Not instinct instead of effort — instinct that commits you, and effort that earns it.
India was built by people who believed before the world gave them permission. It still is. Don’t outsource that belief to a machine.
What idea are you sitting on — waiting for the evidence, when what it really needs is your conviction?
— Nitin
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Connecting Dots — every fortnight, I take a deal, a policy, or a person and tell you the thinking behind it. Insights and instincts.
I’m a corporate and M&A lawyer in Mumbai. For three decades I’ve advised global companies and their boards on coming into India, on joint ventures, and on mergers and acquisitions, and I still do. Busy as that keeps me, I always make time for younger professionals — through this letter, and through my conversations with law students — because staying close to young minds keeps me learning. If something here struck a chord, write back. I read every reply.