One of the most prominent references across multiple seasons of Fargo is to Sisyphus. Over the last month, I revisited the entire series, keeping my wife company. She finally acted on my oft-repeated recommendation, keen to fill the dopamine gap after the latest season of House of the Dragon ended. As she often does, she took me down the rabbit hole of researching characters, references, backstories, fan comments, etc.

I couldn’t help but draw parallels with the recent happenings at the Tata Group.

In the Greek myth, Sisyphus is condemned to push a boulder up a mountain for eternity, watching it roll back down each time he nears the summit. Albert Camus turned the story into a meditation on futility and meaning. The punishment isn’t the labour; it’s the certainty that the labour never ends.

Noel Tata inherited a version of that mountain when he became chairman of Tata Trusts in October 2024. He did not choose the slope. It was handed to him mid-climb, already worn smooth by predecessors, already steep with regulatory demands that refuse to resolve.

The Boulder Rolls Back, Publicly This Time

The specific rock in question is Tata Sons’ public listing. In 2022, the Reserve Bank of India classified Tata Sons as an “upper layer” non-banking financial company, which, under Indian law, obliges it to go public. This was not a welcome instruction from the group’s perspective.

What followed looked a great deal like Sisyphus’s predicament. Tata Sons tried to deregister as a core investment company to escape the classification. It hoped, and reportedly planned around the hope, that regulators would simply extend the deadline rather than enforce it. Each manoeuvre was a shove at the boulder, an attempt to get it over the ridge and out of the way for good.

And each time, the rock came back down. That hope died over the weekend, when the RBI rejected Tata Sons’ request to stay private and confirmed its upper-layer norms apply to the company. What happened next turned a regulatory story into an open boardroom fight. At Thursday’s Tata Sons board meeting, directors voted 4-1 to reappoint incumbent executive chairman N. Chandrasekaran for another five-year term, with Noel Tata, in his capacity as a Tata Trusts nominee, casting the lone dissenting vote. Tata Sons also resolved to begin working toward RBI compliance, effectively committing to a listing path.

Tata Trusts did not let the reappointment stand quietly. It swiftly declared the resolution a legal nullity, arguing that Tata Sons’ Articles of Association require the assenting vote of a majority of trust-nominated directors for decisions of this kind, and that no board tie-breaker can override a trust nominee’s veto. Tata Sons disagrees, leaning on the view that the chairman of the session can cast a deciding vote in a tie. With only two trust nominees currently on the board, voting in opposite directions, that procedural disagreement is now the crux of the fight. Corporate lawyers suggest the truth sits somewhere in between: not obviously “illegal”, but genuinely open to challenge depending on how the Articles’ voting mechanism is read.

This is the shape of Sisyphean labour: not a single defeat, but a defeat that recurs in slightly different clothing every time victory seems close, except now the recurrence is playing out in dueling public statements rather than behind closed doors.

Inheriting Mid-Slope

What makes the metaphor sharper for Noel Tata specifically is that he didn’t start pushing. Ratan Tata pushed the predecessor version of this boulder (the long fight to consolidate control of Tata Sons, reform of the trust structure and the Mistry ouster fight, to name a few) for years before him. Noel picked up a rock already in motion, already scarred by other hands, and inherited both the hill and the argument about who should be climbing it.

He is not climbing alone, which matters, though this week made clear he is not climbing in the same direction as everyone else either. Sisyphus’s punishment is solitary; a chairman’s is not. Chandrasekaran is a co-labourer on this slope, having already set his own clock running by announcing his intended departure by February 2027. Noel, meanwhile, is arguing the group should not be pushing toward listing at all. He has proposed that Tata Sons could satisfy the RBI without explicitly committing to going public, floated a joint committee with Tata Trusts to explore alternatives, and asked the regulator for as long as three years to comply if listing proves truly unavoidable. He has also revived an old lever: a Shapoorji Pallonji Group proposal to sell part of its Tata Sons stake for at least ₹25,000 crore, funded through internal cash and asset sales, which would ease pressure on the ownership structure without a public offering. Bankers, board members, and regulators all have hands somewhere on the rock. If it is futile, it is now a visibly divided futility.

Where the Myth Breaks

But the comparison has a limit, and it’s worth naming, because it’s the point where the myth stops being useful and starts being flattering in a way that misleads.

Sisyphus’s task is futile by design. The gods built failure into the mechanism; there was never a version of the myth where the boulder stays at the top. Tata Sons’ listing has no such metaphysical guarantee of failure. It is a hard, contested, genuinely uncertain process, and now also a live legal question over whether Thursday’s board decision even stands, but it is not structurally impossible. If the IPO happens and the shares hold, the rock stays up. The mountain has a summit that can actually be reached, which is more than can be said for the one in Corinth.

That distinction matters for how you read Noel Tata’s position. He is not cursed. He is constrained by regulation, by succession timing, by a shareholder base that includes both loyalists and adversaries with long memories, and now by an unresolved question of whether his own veto power actually means what he says it means. Constraint is a solvable problem, even when it doesn’t feel like one in the moment. Curses, by definition, aren’t.

The Happiness Clause

Camus’s famous closing move is to insist that “one must imagine Sisyphus happy”. Meaning is found in the pushing itself, not in ever reaching the top. It’s a beautiful idea for a man with no shareholders, no succession clock, and no fiduciary duty to anyone but himself.

It’s a much harder idea to apply to a corporate chairman under a hard regulatory deadline, an overdue annual general meeting that must be held by 31 December, and a rival interpretation of his own trust’s voting rights now sitting out in the open. Noel Tata doesn’t get to find meaning in eternal repetition. He is expected to actually get the boulder over the top, on a timeline, with his name on the outcome, or, as of this week, to prove he can stop someone else from pushing it somewhere he does not want it to go.

Maybe that’s the more honest metaphor now: not a man condemned to push forever, but two men pushing the same rock in different directions, on a mountain that, unlike Sisyphus’s, has a summit, even if nobody yet agrees who is allowed to decide where it is.

(This article was updated on September 18)