IN September 1, for the last board meeting he would ever attend at Bombay House, the seat of the Tata empire, Ajit Baburao Kerkar arrived early. He sat himself down in the chairman's chair in the oak-panelled boardroom and began his wait. There were still 25 minutes left before the other directors would arrive. Enough time to mull over 37 years with the Taj group?

The story of Kerkar's ouster may have actually begun 15 years ago, in 1982, in New York, where 44-year-old Ratan Naval Tata, recently inducted by JRD as chairman of Tata Industries, was watching his mother die of cancer in Sloan Kettering Hospital. It was then that Tata wrote what he believed should be the new agenda for the Tata group, and which came to be known as the 1983 Tata Strategic Plan. Impatient with passive attitudes within the group and the lack of a unifying strategic vision, Tata's manifesto called on India's largest business house to stride aggressively into hi-tech businesses like telecommunications, oil exploration services, infotech, biotechnology,...