Xerxes Desai, former MD of Tata Press and builder of the Titan brand dead at 79

Xerxes Sapur Desai, the man credit with founding the watchmaking division of Tata, Titan, and former managing director of Tata Press, passed away on 27 June 2016. He was 79.

01 Jul 2016 | By Dibyajyoti Sarma

“He was not only our founder, but also our greatest advocate. Over the years, his guidance and dogged pursuit of perfection helped make Titan a household name and a market leader,” the company said in a statement. “He was big thinking, iconoclastic, meticulous, insightful, humanitarian, with an enhanced sense of style and taste, articulate and quality conscious. A passionate rationalist who believed that ‘Yesterday’s truths are today’s heresies,’” added Bhaskar Bhat, managing director, Titan.

A graduate of Bombay and Oxford Universities, Desai played a key role in introducing India to its first quartz watch in the late 80s when he set up Titan (part of Tata Sons), after enduring years of resistance from state-owned and now defunct HMT Watches.

Titan, however, is just but one of the contributions of this truly Renaissance man. One of JRD Tata’s blue-eyed boys, and a lifelong Tata loyalist, Desai spent four decades working across the Tata Group—TAS, Tata Press, Taj Hotels—fighting odds and making a case for businesses to flourish in a closed economy.

At PrintWeek India, Desai will always be remembered as the man behind Tata Press. For one thing, Desai came up with the idea of Titan when he was the managing director of Tata Press in 1970s. It was a long road from planning to fruition, when the Titan factory was set up in Hosur, on the outskirts of Bengaluru, in 1986, with support from the Tamil Nadu government. By the mid 1990s, Titan became a household name. Today, Titan is the world’s fifth largest manufacturer of timepieces.

Desai was cremated on 30 June in Hosur, a region which he played no small role in transforming into a precision engineering hub.

Shashi Sharma, Ex-Tata Press

A great visionary, Xerxes, charmed his way during his leadership at Tata Press. In spite of the fact that he did not come from a printing background, he developed Tata Press into one of the best presses in India. He brought in new technology, for example, he brought in the Harris web press at a time when no one thought of getting web presses for commercial jobs. I am talking of the period in eighties.

There are many other firsts to the credit of Tata Press, which can be attributed to Xerxes’ leadership. Tata Press was the first to introduce Scitex imagesetter, first to diversify into the business form segment among others. Xerxes’ concept of Yellow Pages in the telephone directory printing was path-breaking.

His idea of setting Titan company was a also unique. He convinced JRD Tata, and started Titan from scratch. Like printing, he did not know anything about the watch industry, yet carved a niche for Titan watches with innovative products.

Coming back to Tata Press, Xerxes made a government-looking press, a professional one. He transformed Tata Press into a technological leader, leading the way for other print company to follow suit. I remember my time at Tata Press, where we felt that we are working Xerxes Desai more than the press. That was the kind of charisma he had among his fellow colleagues and employees.

With Xerxes’ demise, we have lost a great leader and a wonderful human being.

(Shashi Sharma was the general manager for commercial at Tata Press, during the period 1989-2005).
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