With the release of Made in India: A Titan Story, a new generation is discovering a name that’s fading from the pages of India’s corporate history. The bespectacled visionary with a glint in his eyes every time he was faced with a new challenge.
He was never the face of Titan. But he was the spine of the company. Long before the brand became a Rs 3.7 lakh crore crown jewel of the Tata empire, Titan was conceived by this pioneer because JRD Tata had made a pledge.
He is Xerxes Desai, and this is his story.
The Taj and CIDCO Years: How Urban Planning Shaped Desai’s Design Language
Desai was born in 1937 into a distinguished Parsi family, Zoroastrian by faith, institution-builders by disposition. He earned a BA in History from Bombay University before heading to Oxford on a JN Tata Scholarship, where he read for a master’s in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.
In 1961, Desai joined the Tata Administrative Service, the group’s elite leadership pipeline. After a stint at Tata Chemicals, he joined Ajit Kerkar (former chairman of the Taj Group) to transform the Taj Group from “one-and-a-half hotels into a chain.”
He helped oversee the Taj Tower project and established landmark properties, including Fort Aguada in Goa, Taj Coromandel in Chennai, and the Lake Palace in Udaipur. Even then, colleagues noticed the eye for detail that would become the defining trait of Titan years later.
However, Desai hardly tread the well-trodden path.
At the peak of his stint in the hospitality industry, he made a move that puzzled his peers. He stepped away to work on urban planning, joining CIDCO to help decongest Bombay. Explaining his decision much later, he has mentioned: “I was done building hotels for the rich.” Working alongside architect Charles Correa, he helped develop Vashi and the nodes that would eventually become Navi Mumbai. His work on urbanisation between 1975- 1985, later earned him a place on Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s National Commission on Urbanisation.
The printing press and the phone call that changed everything
After 1985, Desai was back with the Tata Group. This time, he took charge of Tata Press and transformed a bureaucratic printing operation into a modern enterprise, pioneering the Yellow Pages concept in India. But he grew restless again. On the suggestion of senior bureaucrat Iravatham Mahadevan, his associate Anil Manchanda undertook a detailed exercise to identify untapped industrial sectors. After days of research, five industries were shortlisted: ophthalmic glass, granite tombstones, mechanised fishing boats, watches and one other.
Manchanda made a phone call to Desai and shared his observation- he believed watches seemed to be the most promising option among them.
That phone call quietly altered the future of Indian consumer branding and manufacturing.
The Demise of the HMT Waitlist System
After the call, Desai did his own due diligence. He realised that India’s watch market was a study in absence. “It was a time (the Licence Raj) when one had to write an application to HMT to get a watch. One couldn’t buy it in the open market.” HMT and a handful of smaller players produced barely 1.5 million watches annually. The demand exceeded 30 million.
Customers looked out for quality international brands like Seiko, Citizen, Favre Leuba and Roamer. These were available largely through smuggling networks.
Desai soon understood the gap he needed to cater to: India’s middle class was growing rapidly, becoming more aspirational, wanting markers of identity and taste and finding almost nothing on the shelves. That was his cue.
Titan’s 9-year-long gestation: A story of grit and gumption
Real life does not work like how they show it in movies, though; this business idea took nearly a decade to materialise. Desai had to battle government bureaucracy, industrial licensing restrictions, entrenched incumbents and smuggling networks who recognised in Titan an existential threat.
At one point, a bureaucrat reportedly rejected the Tamil Nadu plant proposal outright, declaring it would happen “over my dead body.” The project temporarily froze.
There were moments they came close to abandoning it. In a reflection written in 1988, Desai recalled: “There were times when Minoo (Mody), Anil (Manchanda) and I felt like abandoning the effort.”
The question is: what kept them going?
“There was one man who thought that the effort should not be slackened. That was JRD Tata,” said Desai.
The project regained momentum after Rajiv Gandhi became Prime Minister. In September 1979, Desai had travelled to Besançon, France, to meet executives at France Ébauches, one of Europe’s leading quartz movement manufacturers.
In 1983, Tata Group, TIDCO (Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation) and France Ébauches formalised their alliance in Paris. Titan Watches Limited was incorporated on July 26, 1984, as a joint venture between Tata Group and TIDCO.
A factory and a township in Hosur
Now came the harder part: Building the factory and deciding the stakeholders. Desai had found a way out for that too. Hosur in the mid-1980s was a small, underdeveloped town with almost no skilled watchmaking workforce.
Titan teams travelled across schools and colleges in districts including Krishnagiri, identifying young candidates with the dexterity needed for precision assembly. They underwent testing and intensive training. Titan provided housing support and, in certain cases, even arranged foster-parent systems for recruits adjusting to industrial life away from home. A lot of the young recruits were women who had passed their 10th grade exams.
Desai called on Charles Correa again to design not just a factory but an integrated township for more than 2,000 Titanians, with educational and community infrastructure built around it. He took particular pride in the fact that many young workers who joined after class X continued their education while working, helping create what he described as a true “learning organisation.” The township was, in many ways, CIDCO in miniature, with the same idea that a factory was also a community and that both deserved to be designed with care.
The Quartz Gamble: How Titan Captured 50% of the Organised Market
One of Desai’s most consequential decisions was deciding to manufacture only quartz watches at a time when India’s market was overwhelmingly mechanical. Instead of relying on a complex network of springs and gears, Quartz Watches use a tiny quartz crystal powered by a battery to keep time with remarkable precision. The result is a watch that is accurate, reliable and easy to maintain
Titan launched in February 1987, introducing elegant quartz watches priced between Rs 350 and Rs 900. Expensive enough to signify aspiration, accessible enough for India’s middle class. Desai confidently predicted that one day every wrist in India would wear a Titan.
Within two years, the company crossed one million watches annually. By the early 2000s, it controlled over 50% of India’s organised watch market. The launch campaign, built around Mozart’s Symphony No. 25, became one of the defining moments in Indian advertising history. When Ogilvy presented the concept, Desai approved it almost instantly.
He later explained: “Of all the symphonies of Mozart, this one has a tremendous amount of enthusiasm and spirit about it.” The Titan melody eventually became one of India’s most recognisable sonic brand identities.
Desai personally reviewed every watch design before production, scrutinising geometry, proportions, colours and finishes with obsessive attention. Former colleagues recalled him patiently educating teams on what constituted the perfect black, the perfect white, the perfect champagne.
Unveiling the Tanishq times
At the height of Titan’s success, Desai made another bold move: entering India’s fragmented, trust-deficit jewellery market.
The name Tanishq itself was his brainchild; He took a suggested Sanskrit name, added “Ta” and replaced the ending with “q”, something rooted in India, yet globally elegant. A pilot plant was established in 1992; the first store opened on Cathedral Road in Chennai in 1996, becoming India’s first organised jewellery retail chain.
The early years brought sustained losses and widespread scepticism. The turnaround came through a single courageous act. In 1999, Tanishq invited consumers in Bengaluru to test jewellery bought from traditional jewellers for purity.
Thousands discovered their gold was significantly below claimed levels. The initiative quietly disrupted the entire jewellery trade, turning transparency into a competitive advantage. By 2003, Tanishq contributed nearly 40% of Titan’s revenues. Today, that figure stands closer to 85–88%.
In 1994, Desai challenged Titan’s engineers to create the world’s thinnest watch, a movement measuring just 1.15mm inside a 3.5mm case. The resulting Titan Edge, launched in 2002, was his argument made in steel and sapphire crystal: Indian companies should compete globally not on price alone, but on innovation, aesthetics and technical sophistication.
The man behind the machine
Desai was known as a perfectionist who blended business leadership with deep interests in architecture, music, literature and urbanism. He was an avid reader, a Western classical music enthusiast and jazz lover. He frequently brought his two dogs to the office.
Bhaskar Bhat, who succeeded him, described Desai as “big thinking, iconoclastic, meticulous, insightful, humanitarian with an enhanced sense of style and taste.” Narayana Murthy called him “a perfectionist, disciplined and always on time”, and recalled that Infosys distributed custom-designed Titan watches to 25,000 employees during its Billion Dollar Day celebrations.
Xerxes Desai passed away in Bengaluru on June 27, 2016. His funeral procession in Hosur drew thousands of employees, workers, and ordinary townspeople who lined the roads to say goodbye to a man many of them had never seen on a billboard or a television screen.
Symbolically, that same year saw the closure of HMT Watches, the very institution whose waitlist had once defined what it meant to own a timepiece in India. A decade later, Amazon MX Player’s Made in India: A Titan Story, which premiered on June 3, 2026, brings his journey to the screen for the first time, with Jim Sarbh playing Desai and Naseeruddin Shah as JRD Tata. For a new generation of viewers discovering the Titan story through the series, his name will no longer be a mystery. It never should have been.
Editorial Note: This profile is based on original reporting, including direct communication with Titan. To ensure a comprehensive perspective, FinancialExpress.com corroborated this information with public records and third-party sources. This content is not sponsored, and FinancialExpress.com retains full editorial independence and final authority over all editorial decisions.