From Jayalalithaa's Benchmate To India's Kitchen King: TT Jagannathan's Legacy

The man behind TTK Prestige leaves a legacy which India should celebrate more deeply.

On the crisp morning of 1 January 1975, a young, newly appointed Managing Director arrived at the gates of his company and was not allowed to enter.

This was how TT Jagannathan, the pioneer of Prestige pressure cookers, who passed away in Bengaluru yesterday, began his now celebrated corporate career.

Armed with an IIT gold medal and a Cornell degree, he had arrived at the gates of his family-owned TTK Ltd (now TTK Prestige) in Bengaluru. However, the factory’s security guards stopped him. The workers inside, battle-scarred by years of disputes and distrust, were probably wary of a newcomer.

It took a call to the police for him to gain entry that day. Jagannathan's response to the hostility was telling of his character. Instead of asserting authority, he quietly refused to sit in the Managing Director's chair.

For months, he worked from a small wooden desk at the end of the corridor, sharing tea with machinists and clerks. It was his way of showing that he truly belonged with the rest of the workers and was not just the scion of a prominent industrial family from the south. (Jagannathan's grandfather was, of course, TT Krishnamachari, the former Finance Minister of India.)

Jagannathan quickly turned to improving the fortunes of TTK Ltd. His breakthrough came when he achieved what even veterans thought impossible. He convinced the Aluminium Controller of India (yes, that was an actual government post in those licence-raj years) to grant TTK Ltd permission to buy 35 tonnes of aluminium a month.

That single bureaucratic victory meant that cookers could roll off the assembly lines again and production could be streamlined. The workforce's suspicion turned to admiration. In time, Jagannathan became their 'TTJ sir', not a distant boss, but the man who fought for the company’s survival.

It was an entry, quite literally, forged in resistance, and it set the tone for everything that followed.

From Jayalalithaa's desk to India's kitchens

Before that fateful morning, Jagannathan's life had seemed destined for academia rather than assembly lines.

Born into the illustrious TTK family, his early life was far removed from factories and boardrooms. At Church Park Convent in Chennai, he shared a classroom bench with a precociously bright girl named, wait for it, J Jayalalithaa for five years (class I to V). "She was brilliant and always impeccably turned out," he later recalled.

Jagannathan excelled in studies, graduated from IIT Madras with a gold medal, and pursued a master’s at Cornell University. In his memoir Disrupt and Conquer (co-authored with Sandhya Mendonca), he recalls wanting to pursue a PhD and an academic life in the US. However, in 1972, a crisis in the family business brought him home. At that time, his father TT Narasimhan was helming the company.

Jagannathan’s first assignment was not with the cookers business but with the Maps & Atlases unit (established in 1965 in collaboration with Bertelsmann of Germany), which was losing Rs 60 lakh annually and was saddled with debt. He moved that unit into contract printing (books, pamphlets, government school books, posters) to stop the losses.

When he took charge of the company's flagship, the Bangalore cooker plant, the Prestige brand was already a staple in Indian kitchens. However, it came with the stigma of poor safety. Too many consumers had heard of cookers bursting, leaving wives and mothers with scars. When Jagannathan toured markets in North India, shopkeepers reportedly bluntly told him, "Your cookers are dangerous. Who will buy them?"

That humiliation became the spark for one of Indian industry’s simplest yet most profound safety innovations: the Gasket Release System (GRS). His engineering team designed a pressure cooker whose rubber gasket would lift and release excess steam safely if the main vent failed. It was elegant, inexpensive, and revolutionary. "Since then," Jagannathan often said with pride, "not a single Prestige cooker has burst in the field."

He never patented the mechanism. Instead, he allowed competitors to copy it because it built public confidence not just in Prestige but in pressure cookers as a category. This industry-first generosity was born not of naivety but of strategic vision.

In the 1980s came the iconic advertising campaign: 'Jo biwi se kare pyaar, woh Prestige se kaise kare inkaar?' A campaign that made the humble cooker a symbol of domestic affection rather than drudgery.

An expansion based on prudence

Under his leadership, Prestige expanded its product range: pressure pans, nonstick cookware, stainless steel cookers, and, in 2011, a microwave-friendly pressure cooker named MicroChef. Over time, the group bought out the Indian rights to the Prestige brand from the UK collaborator, ending earlier dependencies.

During his early years, Jagannathan had to navigate India’s oppressive tax regime, some of which, ironically, was a legacy of rules laid by his grandfather as Finance Minister. At one point, income tax was at 97%, wealth tax 5%, and even expenditure tax existed. In 1979, a 100% import duty on shaving cream and toothpaste forced the group to exit its Williams shaving cream business.

By the dint of hard work, TTK group survived these difficult times. By December 2002, Jagannathan had eliminated the last of the TTK Group's debts, finally allowing the business to grow free of crippling leverage. This milestone quietly capped three decades of turnaround work.

For the record, TTK Group, apart from TTK Prestige, also includes TTK Healthcare, managed by TTJ’s younger brother TT Raghunathan, which is involved in pharmaceuticals, consumer products, biomedical devices, and foods. The group is also involved with food production (Fryums and Pani Puri Pellets), the Eva line of consumer care products, TTK Chitra Heart Valves, TTK Ortho Knee implants, and more.

From cookers to condoms, the art of disruption

If the kitchen was Jagannathan's first playground, the bedroom was his second.

In 1963, long before 'Make in India' was a slogan, TTK had partnered with London Rubber Company, makers of Durex, to set up India’s first condom factory in Pallavaram, Chennai. It was an audacious venture for its time, both technically and socially. For decades, the plant quietly produced condoms for the Indian market, until ownership changes abroad forced TTK to create its own brand.

After the group lost rights to Durex and Kohinoor in 2010, Jagannathan and his team introduced Skore in 2012. Within three years, Skore captured 10% of India’s condom market. Its success lay in refusing to hide behind euphemisms. Jagannathan’s pitch to his young marketing team was disarmingly simple: 'Don’t sell it as family planning. Sell it as fun.'

Positioned as a 'pre-marital pleasure enhancer' rather than a 'married man’s tool of responsibility,' Skore resonated with a new India, bold, urban, and unashamed. When asked later how he managed to bring such products to market in a conservative society, he smiled and replied, "with a gun to my head."

Pragmatic and philosophical

Jagannathan was different from most family patriarchs in his insistence on professional management. He once said that one of the hardest things in business was 'to learn to step aside.' His focus was on building systems, not dynasties.(Jagannathan's 3 sons, all Cornell-educated, followed their own careers and interests. The third son, however, did come and join TTK Prestige a few years ago, and he incidentally passed away three weeks back).

His philosophy was practical. "What if I nominated one of my sons to become the next Managing Director and he were to make a mess of it? There would be a lot more difficulty in removing a son than in replacing someone from outside the family. My children agree that running the company should be entrusted to professionals," he reportedly said.

He also supported philanthropic arms like the TT Ranganathan Clinical Research Foundation (focusing on addiction recovery), collaborated with IIT Madras on biomedical research, and backed initiatives like Rotary Bangalore – TTK Blood Bank and Madras Voluntary Blood Bank.

The true kitchen king

Yet, Jagannathan was no boardroom cliché. He was a man of many parts: a trained sportsman, an accomplished cook, a musician, and a meticulous craftsman who could knit and sew. Those close to him admired his curiosity. He could discuss the tensile strength of aluminium one moment and the perfect rasam recipe the next.

His three management mantras were simple: show up at work every day, mind the details, and use common sense.

Friends remember him for his mischievous wit, intellectual curiosity, and fondness for storytelling. His autobiography Disrupt and Conquer, which blends history, humour, and humility, reads less like a corporate manual and more like a conversation with a genial elder who witnessed India evolve from shortages to startups.

From being locked out of his own factory to building one of India’s most trusted home-grown brands, Jagannathan embodied resilience, intellect, and humility. In an era when Tamil Nadu's business landscape was dominated by automobile and tech giants, he went to Bengaluru and stood out for building a consumer brand rooted in the rhythms of Indian homes.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, he proved that an Indian family business could reinvent itself without losing its roots. In a world where second-generation heirs often flounder, Jagannathan became a model of how legacy could meet modernity.

In the end, he should be remembered not just for the gleaming cookers on our kitchen counters or the smart condom ads on billboards, but for the idea that Indian enterprise could be world-class without losing its warmth or wit.