At a crucial juncture during Made In India: A Titan Story, JRD Tata (Naseeruddin Shah) reminds the enthusiastic Xerxes Desai (Jim Sarbh) that the Tatas shouldn’t just help build India into a superpower nation but a happy country as well. Ever since Jamshetji laid the foundations for the Tata family’s entrepreneurial legacy in early 1900s, their focus has always been on nation building and ethics as much as building profitable businesses. It’s that focus on doing things right that has always held the Tata family and all their ventures far above other business families. Made In India: A Titan Story, is a 6-episode series that chronicles the birth and explosion of one of Tatas’ most iconic brands, Titan. The Made In India moniker works out for the show and aligns itself with the current sentiment of Swadeshi, too. But above all its relevance and finesse, what really anchors this show are the 2 central performances.
Naseeruddin Shah as JRD Tata is a masterclass and proof that skill is impervious to time. It helps enormously that Shah is a physical dead ringer for the man. The bearing, the measured warmth, the way authority sits lightly on his shoulders. Every scene he occupies carries an almost gravitational pull. You understand immediately why Xerxes and his team work themselves to exhaustion, why they overshoot budgets and deadlines without apology. All anyone wants is a nod, a quiet smile from the old man. Shah gives Tata a paternal tenderness that never tips into sentimentality, and his few pointed one-liners land with the weight of gospel. Jim Sarbh, for his part, brings his now-familiar cocktail of eccentricity and restless intelligence to Xerxes Desai. He plays the man as genuinely flawed, impulsive, occasionally manipulative, driven by an ego that he’s charming enough to make you forgive and the performance feels alive in every frame. The two actors together are the show’s finest argument for its own existence.
Which makes it all the more frustrating that they don’t share enough of the screen. Six episodes later, you’re left with a nagging hunger. This needed more Naseer, and crucially, more of Naseer and Jim Sarbh in the same room. The scenes between them crackle with the kind of warmth and intellectual friction that the show’s more mechanical stretches sorely lack. When Shah’s Tata leans forward in counsel or turns a quiet line into something that sounds like wisdom earned over decades, you feel the series operating at a level it doesn’t always sustain.
Because for all its ambition and period polish, Made In India: A Titan Story is not consistently the sum of its parts. The episodic structure too often reduces what should be seismic challenges into procedural hurdles, ticked off rather than truly felt. Xerxes’ conflicts, both within the organisation and against the world outside, never quite build the tension the story demands. The European chapter, which should be the show’s most dramatically charged passage, with Titan’s pride and international credibility on the line, arrives and resolves with surprisingly little weight. The stakes feel staged. The drama often feels choreographed, the obstacles more convenient than inevitable. It’s like the performances are constantly saving the writing. There’s a recurring pattern across the six episodes where the writers, to their credit, establish a conflict clearly but don’t burrow deep enough into it for the resolution to hit home.
The supporting cast do solid work within the boundaries they’re given. Vaibhav Tatwawadi’s Akash is the necessary counterpoint to Xerxes’ romantic recklessness. He’s sober, grounded, essential and Tatwawadi plays the role with a surety that earns its own moments. Kaveri Seth and Lakshvir Singh Saran bring genuine niceness to their performances in the ensemble.
Technically, the show is handsomely mounted. The recreation of Bombay, Bangalore, and Hosur across decades feels authentic. The production design looks perfect, especially the visual edit choice of opening key scenes with sepia-tone docu-drama style frames, which gradually transition into wider, sharper frames. Aditya Kapur’s cinematography gives the period texture a clean elegance, and Abhishek Nailwal’s background score stays tastefully in service of the narrative. The use of old Hindi film songs as temporal signposts, Kya Hua Tera Vaada getting a particularly well-timed deployment, is one of the show’s more satisfactory creative decisions. The integration of archival footage along with the ’60s songs adds a layer of authenticity that no production design budget alone can replicate.
Made In India: A Titan Story is at its best a warm, well-intentioned love letter to the spirit of Indian enterprise, to the men and women who believed, in the face of Swiss scepticism and domestic bureaucracy, that India could put a world-class watch on the world’s wrist. Just Naseeruddin Shah’s JRD Tata is reason enough to watch this show. It’s a performance so precise and physically uncanny that it makes you wish the show had been built around him entirely.
Also Read: Naseeruddin Shah to Embody JRD Tata in Made in India – A Titan Story
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: filmfare.com
