“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.