Life After Titan, Vistara and CMCA: Still Trekking, Still Dreaming | Bhaskar Bhat & Vrunda Bhaskar

ELI5/TLDR

Bhaskar Bhat ran Titan for two decades and built Tanishq into a household brand; his wife Vrunda Bhaskar founded CMCA, a civic-education nonprofit that has worked with lakhs of schoolchildren. Now 71 and 64, they spend this Zerodha-network podcast not on business war stories but on how a long life actually works: no work-life balance to speak of, a shared obsession with Himalayan trekking, and a quiet conviction that the best years come after 50. The business anecdotes that do surface — the Titan interview, Rakesh Jhunjhunwala’s warmth, Ratan Tata’s manners — are about character, not strategy. The thesis throughout: do work you love, stay curious, and remain physically and mentally active until you’re 99.

The Full Story

Work-life balance was never the question

Asked how they handled the famous tension, Bhat answers flatly that for him it didn’t exist.

For me, there was nothing called work life balance. I believed that I behaved the same way at work as at home.

This isn’t a humblebrag about hustle. His point is narrower and more interesting: when you feel genuinely responsible for the people who work for you, your head is oriented toward the job whether or not you’re at a desk. He took calls at any hour. He frames it not as discipline but as a kind of constant background process you can’t switch off — and notes drily that this is “very irritating to many people today.”

Vrunda says the same thing from the nonprofit side. CMCA, founded 25 years ago, was “like a new baby,” and nothing new grows without that kind of attention. She’s honest about the bill, though.

Whether it has a cost, yes it does have a cost. Mainly on the family, maybe on the self too.

Their shared escape hatch from the no-balance trap is that they liked the work. Bhat keeps circling back to the cliché — “do what you like or like what you do” — and keeps undercutting it, because he knows it’s easier said than lived. His honest version: they were fortunate. There was no need to unwind because there was nothing to recover from.

A marriage arranged partly on trekking credentials

The most charming thread is the trekking. Vrunda caught the bug young, watching her brother return from the Himalayas with slide projections — “those days no video no phone, just the photos.” When her future husband came for the arranged-marriage meeting fresh off a trek, she made a snap decision on shaky data:

This guy at least goes trekking, which I’ve been wanting to do. So I said okay, let me marry her.

Bhat’s first trek was a 1978 student expedition up to Kullu-Manali, before Maggie noodles existed, hauling a pressure cooker in a backpack and cooking nutri-nuggets. The couple’s first trek together came thirteen years into the marriage — Zongri Top in Sikkim — and Vrunda nearly quit near the end. They’ve since done eight or nine Himalayan treks. A knee injury fourteen years ago put Bhat in braces, but the one thing he refuses to give up is trekking. Nepal is still on the list.

”Think big,” on a board he didn’t understand yet

The Titan origin story is the best business beat. Bhat answered an ad for a vague “watch project,” prepped diligently at the British Library in Ahmedabad on watch movements and quartz versus mechanical, then walked into the founder Xerxes Desai’s office at Tata Press past a board that read THINK BIG. He didn’t know what it meant. The interview went sideways in the best way:

Then he started talking about the world watch market. I said, hello, this is now out of syllabus.

Desai never asked a technical question. He was selling the job — painting a vision — and Bhat’s takeaway decades later is about the gap between a middle-class kid optimizing for “the best job at placement” and someone who can actually think in terms of entrepreneurship and scale. His broader claim: everyone can think big; most people are just talked out of it by their upbringing. He credits his own generation with freeing their children from the old contract (“get a good job, look after your parents, look after your children”) — telling them instead to look after themselves and do what they want. He calls this, half-seriously, the India story.

Jhunjhunwala and Tata, remembered for warmth, not wins

Two recently departed figures get eulogies, and both are notably stripped of business content. Rakesh Jhunjhunwala — the famous Titan investor — is remembered not for his returns but for emotional excess. Directors warned Bhat about taking his calls (insider-trading optics), but Bhat trusted him. The man would cry on the phone begging them to attend his 50th birthday, chartered planes, supported CMCA, and dropped everything to help when Bhat mentioned his daughter Aditi’s wedding date. “Very large-hearted,” Bhat repeats.

Ratan Tata gets a single perfect image: at the end of every meeting, even the last one, he’d walk a guest to the door and ask, “Do you have a car?” Bhat would laugh and tell him to go back inside. The detail does all the work the eulogy needs.

CMCA: children fixing their own villages

Vrunda’s proudest stories are about agency, not charity. A girl named Lavanya went on a hunger strike in her own home until her father used a government grant to build a toilet — and roughly 200 households in the village followed. Through CMCA’s children’s assemblies (a junior version of the gram panchayat), kids have gotten roads repaired, school toilets built, and child marriages stopped by writing to MLAs and village leaders.

The rapid-fire, and the bucket lists

The lightning round is mostly texture — she binges Self Made, he’s a spy-thriller man (Forsyth, le Carré, Ludlum) who loved Jamtara; comfort food is curd rice and idli sambar; songs are the Carpenters and Kashmir Ki Kali. The bucket lists are where the back half of life shows up. Vrunda wants to sing and dance well, and “find myself.” Bhat wants to learn a musical instrument, ride the Golden Quadrilateral by train, and read the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit — not to learn the language, but to understand the text.

The closing advice is the heart of the thing. To a 30-year-old self: don’t be scared, go do what you want (her) and care more about your family and the time you give them (him). To the newly retired: there’s a lot of life left, and the best years may come after 50 or 60. And Bhat’s note on curiosity lands with a concrete image — his father-in-law doing Sudoku, taking photos, and cracking jokes on WhatsApp at 99.

Key Takeaways

• The honest reframe of work-life balance: it isn’t about hours, it’s about whether your head can ever leave the job. For people who feel responsible for their teams, it can’t — and the only sustainable version is loving the work enough that there’s nothing to recover from.
• “Do what you like or like what you do” is a cliché Bhat respects precisely because he knows it’s mostly luck whether it works out. He doesn’t pretend it’s a formula.
• Titan’s hiring lesson: Desai sold the vision, not the role, and never tested watch trivia. People follow a picture of what’s possible, not a job description.
• “Think big” is less about ambition than about removing the ceiling your upbringing installed. His generation’s real contribution, he claims, was releasing their kids from the obligation to look after their parents — unlocking the startup energy that followed.
• Both eulogies (Jhunjhunwala, Tata) are about character — warmth, manners, large-heartedness — not business acumen. What people remember about powerful figures is how they treated others.
• Longevity playbook, stated plainly: stay physically active (yoga, swimming, badminton, trekking with knee braces at 71), stay mentally curious, and treat post-50 as the prime of life rather than the wind-down.
• CMCA’s model is civic agency for children — kids pressuring their own families and local officials to fix toilets, roads, and stop child marriages. The wins come from giving children a structured voice, not from outside aid.

Claude’s Take

This is a warm, low-stakes “elders dispensing wisdom” interview, and it’s better than the format usually allows because both subjects refuse to over-claim. Bhat in particular keeps catching his own platitudes mid-sentence — he’ll start to say “do what you love” and then immediately concede it’s “easily said” and chalk his own outcome up to fortune. That intellectual honesty is rare in retired-CEO content, which usually sands every lucky break into a repeatable lesson.

The BS filter flags the obvious: the auto-transcription is rough (names are mangled — “Rakil Junjunala,” “Zak’s Desai,” “Sri Atant Tata”), so treat any specific quote as paraphrase. And there’s an unavoidable survivorship sheen — it’s easy to say “don’t be scared, do what you want” from the far side of a Titan-sized success. The advice isn’t wrong, it’s just cheap to give from where they’re sitting.

What earns the score is the texture: the pressure cooker on the 1978 trek, the THINK BIG board he didn’t understand, Tata asking if you have a car, the 99-year-old doing Sudoku on WhatsApp. Those land. There’s no strategic insight here for anyone studying how Titan or Tanishq were actually built — this is a life-and-character interview, not a business one — so 6 feels right. Pleasant, genuine, occasionally moving, not essential.