New Delhi, Aug. 15 -- Best of the Week is a weekly newsletter by Siddharth Sharma/Shravani Sinha. Subscribe to Mint's newsletters to get them directly in your inbox.

There's a name conspicuously missing from every conversation happening inside Bombay House right now: Natarajan Chandrasekaran's. Barely a day after the man who ran the Tata empire for nine years told the board he wouldn't seek a third term, the only question anyone at India's biggest conglomerate seems to care about is who's next?

It's a deceptively simple question wrapped around a genuinely messy answer. Because this isn't just about picking a new chairman. It's about a 158-year-old business house deciding what kind of company it wants to be: family-run or professionally ...