R Dinesh

This story begins in 1983, the year Kapil’s Devils turned the cricketing world on its head. At Lords, the Mecca of cricket, India upstaged the kings of Calypso music, the West Indies. It bested the London bookies who had marked us at 50:1 odds-against to win the Prudential Cup. Celebration amongst fans went far into the night.

Around the same time, in the temple town of Madurai in southern Tamil Nadu, the mood at the TVS group was somber. 53-year old R Ramachandran, a grandson of the Group’s founder and patriarch T V Sundaram Iyengar, was in a pickle. The situation had to do with his son R Dinesh, a cricketer good enough to play the Rohinton Baria Trophy for the University and talked about as being shortlisted for the state’s under-23 cricket team.

Dinesh had recently passed his 12th standard board exam in the mathematics, physics, and chemistry group, and was getting ready to study engineering. He was spoilt for choice: there were admission cards from the priceless BITS Pilani and the topnotch College of Engineering, Guindy. With his proficiency in Hindi, Pilani would have been a breeze. With his suave background, Madras would have been easy to settle in. If you think Dinesh tossed a coin to decide, you are wrong. He let both the opportunities pass and chose the Thiagarajar College of Engineering (TCE). The reason: TCE was located in his native city of Madurai. Imagine the day when a compulsive globetrotter wanted to be confined to the temple town!

But hold on. As megastar Shah Rukh Khan said in one of his movies, “Picture Abhi Baaki Hai.”

On the fourth day at TCE, after going through a couple of introductory sessions, Dinesh felt the T-square and the drawing board with its several instruments no longer appealed to him. He wasn’t sure if this was what he wanted to do for a living. The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced he should cop out. It was the first of a series of indications that the TVS scion had a strong mind, and was okay with making unpleasant choices, unmindful of social obligations.

By the way, his decision had nothing to do with the college. It had everything to do with engineering.

So, the tall young man came home, walked up to his dad, mustered the courage, and said, “I don’t like engineering. I want to drop out.” He might as well have said, “I want to drop a nuclear bomb.” No Tambrahm parent likes a son to jump ship from engineering. R Ramachandran was no different. He had undergone training in the General Motors Institute of Management at Michigan, USA, in the late 1950s and is credited with the introduction of unique HR initiatives in TVS. For a while, it looked as though the rug was being pulled from under his feet.