Xerxes Desai, the Man Who Waited a Decade to Build Titan
Most brand builders get remembered for the campaign or the product. Desai is remembered for surviving the decade before either existed.
Xerxes Desai spent roughly a decade convincing a famously conservative industrial house to bet on a watch, before Titan ever produced one for sale. If Verghese Kurien's genius was structural and Sylvester da Cunha's was creative, Desai's specific talent was conviction sustained against sceptical internal resistance for far longer than most executives would tolerate.
An unlikely path to watchmaking
Desai joined the Tata group in 1961 as a Tata Administrative Services officer with an Oxford degree in politics, philosophy and economics, not an engineer and not a horologist. He worked first at Tata Chemicals, then helped expand the Taj hotel chain, and contributed to building the Vashi township alongside architect Charles Correa. None of that career path obviously points toward watches, which makes his eventual pitch, at Tata Press in 1977, to build a modern Indian watch company, a genuine outsider's idea rather than an obvious next step.
A decade of no before the yes
The idea that became Titan took roughly ten years to move from pitch to product, years spent overcoming technical scepticism, internal bureaucracy and doubt about whether an Indian manufacturer could credibly build a quartz watch business at all. Titan finally launched in 1986 as a joint venture between Tata and the Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation, with continued backing from J.R.D. Tata, whose support across that uncertain decade mattered as much as any individual piece of Desai's own persistence.
Most brand builders get remembered for the campaign or the product. Desai is remembered for surviving the decade before either existed.
Building a premium brand through obsessive detail, not slogans
Desai's brand instincts showed up in specific, unusual decisions rather than conventional marketing. He chose Mozart's 25th Symphony for Titan's early advertising, an unmistakably premium, almost classical choice for a category still associated with utility and imported watches. He personally reviewed watch designs against strict quality standards, and later coined the name Tanishq for the jewellery brand he built once Titan had proven the model, a piece of naming judgement that has now outlasted him by decades.
Building the town along with the brand
Desai also built the physical and social infrastructure around Titan's manufacturing in Hosur, including worker housing and, in 2001, founding the Titan School for the children of the township's residents. Brand trust built on a quality promise is harder to sustain if the workforce making the product is not genuinely invested in staying, and Desai treated that as part of the same project rather than a separate corporate social responsibility exercise.
A legacy still being told
Desai retired in 2002, succeeded by his protégé Bhaskar Bhat, and died in June 2016. His story has recently reached a new audience through the 2026 biographical drama series Made In India: A Titan Story, in which he is portrayed by actor Jim Sarbh, a rare instance of an Indian brand builder's specific, patient, unglamorous struggle becoming popular entertainment rather than a footnote in a company history document. Few founders get asked twice, once by history and once by a television screenwriter, to prove their story was worth telling.
Photo: courtesy Tata Group.