By When I pressed play, I didn’t get up until it was over. Six episodes, one sitting. That’s when I knew this one was worth my time. “Made in India: A Titan Story” was about an Indian who set out to make something the world said couldn’t be made here, and as someone who builds for a living, that’s a story I’ll always stop for.
It opens in 1978. Xerxes Desai, a Tata executive, is handed a dying division, and somewhere in that mess he sees a different idea entirely which was India making its own world-class watch. At the time the market belonged to smuggled and foreign brands. Most people would have looked at that and walked away but instead Desai did the unglamorous work first, he studied the market. Who was selling, who was buying, how much each player held, and exactly what technology they were leaning on. He understood the ground he’d be fighting on. That patience, before any ambition, is where the whole thing began. So, know the market before you fall in love with the product.
While the established players stayed with mechanical movements, Desai bet on quartz which was the newer, sharper technology nobody had fully committed to yet. That was his edge.
It’s a lesson I keep relearning that you rarely win by trying to beat the market leader at their own game. The smarter move is to get ahead with the technology they’re still ignoring. And you don’t wait for the market to make room for you, you carve out your own space by putting something on the shelf that isn’t already there.
You can’t out-think a competitor whose tools you don’t understand. The existing players had their methods, and Desai studied them cold before he tried to beat them. First know the technology the incumbents are standing on then bet on the technology of tomorrow.
None of it came easy, and the series is honest about that. There were rejections, licensing knots, funding doors slamming shut at the worst possible moment. What carried the project was the willingness to fail, go back to the drawing board and return with something better each time.
Stumble, study, rebuild.
Watching it, I realised that rhythm isn’t a setback in the work; it is the work.
A great product still has to reach people. In that era brands lived on billboards, but television was arriving, and Desai moved early and spent boldly on it. He calculated the risks but brave ones.
A brand has to live in your head, not just on a hoarding.
Think about how we still talk. We don’t ask for toothpaste, we ask for Colgate. We don’t say photocopy, we say “Xerox.” What set Desai apart wasn’t a product or a logo, it was a feeling. A reimagined piece of Mozart became a tune woven into everyday life. Brands can imitate visuals, but they struggle to replicate connection. Find what makes people remember you.
But the moment that stayed with me longest had little to do with watches. There were times where even Desai and his closest people were ready to give up. The one who refused to let the dream die was JRD Tata. Every founder, knows that feeling when walking away seems perfectly reasonable. What changes the outcome is often a single person who steadies you and points you forward. Talent gets you to the start line. The right mentor takes you past where you could ever have gone alone. And I think every entrepreneur should go looking for their JRD.
Also, Desai didn’t airlift a finished workforce into Tamil Nadu. He took young people from the villages around the factory and trained them into world-class craftsmen. He was building an ecosystem, not just a plant. That’s a kind of genius when you develop the youth in your own vicinity, they don’t merely fill jobs, they become an asset that grows along with the company and the place. And beneath all of it, he was building a community, not only a balance sheet. After years of doing this myself, I’ve come to believe that’s where the real satisfaction sits. The philanthropic side of the work gives back more than any single success ever does.
So, I didn’t just watch this as entertainment. “Made in India” isn’t a phrase I scroll past, it’s close to what we attempt every day, whether we’re producing biopolymers that needn’t be imported or raising structures meant to outlast us.
The Titan story tied it all together for me. Read the market honestly, back the technology of tomorrow, survive your failures, build a brand people carry in their heads, find the mentor who won’t let you quit, and lift the people around you as you climb. Do those things together, over a long enough stretch of time and you build something that is genuinely ours.