AP PHOTOS: Tata is a household name for hundreds of millions across India

Firdosa Jan, a Kashmiri housewife, is making tea in her home kitchen. The packet she gets the leaves from has Tata Tea Gold printed on it. Hundreds of miles away in the northeastern Indian state of Nagaland 25-year-old Teisovinuo Yhome is cooking a dish on an open fire, using Tata salt for seasoning. Yhome helps her mother with the household shopping and says they have always bought Tata salt as far as she can remember. Tata has been a mythical name in Indian consumer’s imagination for generations. Even before the days of aggressive marketing, Tata was a household name. People consumed its salt and tea, saw its lorries plying on the roads, took rides on Tata-made buses to commute to work, used its beauty products and lived in houses built with its steel. Anecdotes abounded about Tata. Even though it was a business conglomerate, in popular imagination Tata was a man to envy and emulate, who at the turn of the 20th century, built the first luxury hotel, which was better than any the...