In India, making a film/web series based on real events/people is an adventure sport. There’s no way it can criticise political powers without being selective.

Real people/organisations depicted in the narrative need to sign off on permissions before one depicts them, which becomes trickier if the depiction is anything beyond heroic or idealistic. The legal departments comb through the script picking apart inane details; one might argue such films/shows are made by lawyers as much as filmmakers. No wonder most look timid and cauterised.

The additional obstacle for Robbie Grewal’s Made in India: A Titan Story, adapted from Vinay Kamath’s book, Titan: Inside India’s Most Successful Consumer Brand (2018), is that it’s also partly sponsored by Titan.

How can such a show be expected to depict a company and its key personnel in an objective manner? Straying from the agreement might mean losing access to the Tata archives; a sizeable part of the show.

It’s only fair for one to assume that they’re about to watch a corporate advertorial for the company and its white-washed legacy. At six episodes, with a runtime of nearly an hour each, Grewal’s show risks looking like a corporate advertorial in some episodes, while also coming across as a good-natured raconteur in some, talking about the ‘good old days’.

However, one scene in the second episode made me sit up. Xerxes Desai (Jim Sarbh), an old hand in J.R.D. Tata (Naseeruddin Shah)’s tenure at the helm of Tata group, is casually told about “achhe din”.

He responds to it with: “Achhe din aate nahi hai, unhe laana padhta hai (The good times don’t come by themselves, they need to be summoned through hard work).” It’s a cheeky and probably the only indicator that writers of this show are aware of contemporary politics.

Reconstructing the period of the 1970s and 1980s, the show depicts the spark that led to Xerxes, along with a core group of colleagues, under the tutelage of the wise J.R.D., birthing one of independent India’s most premium brands – Titan.

Like most period shows set during Nehruvian India (like Rocket Boys, also starring Jim Sarbh), and even post-Nehruvian era, this one has the optimism of a golden retriever. It’s bright and sunny, the background score is usually chirpy, most characters are honest, and the slow (and corrupt) bureaucracy is handled with kid gloves.

No character is trying to undercut the other, or take credit for someone else’s work. When a minor confrontation does take place between two characters, it also resolves itself within the next 20 minutes.

The plot is something we’ve seen, over and over again. A restless, workaholic Xerxes (Sarbh sports a bald patch throughout the show) is searching for a ‘challenging’ project with his ‘second family’: the Tata group.

Being on first-name basis and golf buddies with J.R.D., Xerxes is tasked with turning around the loss-making Tata Press. A chance encounter to help revive its fortunes leads Xerxes to a government of India employee who tells him he was recently demoted for confiscating a large consignment of imported watches. This is before India’s economy opened up: so every watch imported through official channels would attract huge duties, making them unaffordable for most.

If they were smuggled, the watches could be sold with steep profit margins, and would still cost less than an imported watch. Xerxes, like protagonists of these shows, recognises the vacuum for an Indian brand, which can compete with European and Japanese brands.

The company goes through its ups and downs, two steps forward and five steps backward. When the company does well, one of the principal characters becomes too cocksure, places a bold bet, and learns his lesson in humility.

Most of Made in India: A Titan Story is familiar territory. But what sets it apart is the treatment, which harks back to the Utopia of 1950s Hindi cinema – films like Do Bigha Zameen (1953) and Naya Daur (1957), where India was finding its feet. When everything Hindustani was a matter of pride. We, as a country, had a chip on our shoulder. As many around the world looked at India with curiosity and bemusement, there was an eagerness in the generation to prove like we belonged. That feeling, like in Rocket Boys, comes through here as well.

Xerxes is a maverick, whose outlandish, unconventional ideas are often met with “But, sir, that’s impossible!” Only for Sarbh to flash his knowing grin, and the task is accomplished in the next scene. Sarbh’s Xerxes is sincere, warm and resolute. His accomplice, Akash (Vaibhav Tatwawadi) is the more cautious one.

While Xerxes likes taking big swings, it’s Akash, who is a stand-in for India’s ultra-conservative stance at the time. I was slightly annoyed by the track about Akash’s father, diagnosed with Alzheimer’s – which felt like a plot-point manufactured for the soap-opera sensibilities of the audience.

The company’s first employees: Megha Mhatre (Kaveri Seth), Gaurav Dhar (Lakshvir Saran), and K.S. Gopalan (Joy Sengupta) are all more than adequate for their parts, bringing a distinctly sweet dynamic with Xerxes and Akash. Even as the show is mired in cliches, this easy-on-the-eyes cast ensures that the show remains watchable.

However, one does get the sense that the series was primarily conceptualised around the scenes between Xerxes and J.R.D. – where Naseeruddin Shah appears like Master Oogway (of Kung Fu Panda), once in a while, to share pearls of wisdom, especially when Xerxes and his team hit seemingly insurmountable roadblocks. There’s nothing subtle about Shah’s performance as J.R.D., but there’s a visible ease between him and Sarbh, which makes the scenes a joy to watch.

Bhushan Kumar and Krishna Kumar of T series are listed as co-producers on the show, which probably explains the dime a dozen needle-drops of the Hindi film songs from the yesteryears. I think the songs were a last-minute addition, because very few of them seem appropriate, or even elevate the respective scenes.

There’s also the retro filter of Mumbai’s archival footage, which is used as cutaways between scenes, which becomes a bit of an eyesore after a point. The gaze towards foreigners appears to be stereotypical where white-skin folks can’t speak to Indians without a feeling of superiority. It might be accurate for its time, but it feels a bit passe.

It’s the show’s cast that makes this a journey worth considering. The show could be passed off as ‘Tata propaganda’ (it’s virtually impossible to make a gritty, realistic show about the Tata group today), but it also feels like a throwback to an idealistic nation of the past – which only had its dreams, intellect and will to succeed. For all its sanitised history and corporate sheen, the show captures something rare: a vision of India that saw the future as something to build, instead of using it as a punchline to feign influence and power.

Published in special arrangement with TheWire.in

Made in India: A Titan Story

Director: Robbie Grewal
Year: 2026

Available: Amazon MX Player