You don’t go away from the lighthouse, you go towards it,” shares 27-year-old Shantanu Naidu, somewhere in the early part of his memoir, when he appears to be at a crossroads, where a new life is waiting to begin for him at Cornell University in Ithaca and a fledgling friendship had to be left behind. It’s that moment, which in a way, becomes a life-changing incident in Naidu’s life, prompting him to make a choice to return home after his MBA at Cornell, so that he could be closer to his lighthouse, Ratan Tata. For over a year now, Naidu’s friendship with the veteran industrialist, philanthropist, and former chairman of Tata Sons, has drawn a lot of curiosity and public attention. A friendship between a millennial and an octogenarian is not run-of-the-mill. Naidu, who knew Tata for over four years before that, says he was aware of the extraordinariness of their bond. '

“A lot of youngsters expressed their envy, in a constructive way of course, saying that I had no idea what position I was in. Initially, I was quite flattered. But, I soon realised that these people actually wanted to be in my position, because they wanted to see what I was seeing, and hear from Mr Tata, what I was hearing. I had been enjoying a certain kind of privilege, and it would have been very selfish to keep it all to myself,” says Naidu, adding, “That sort of seemed the right time to put it all down.”