When I wear the hat of management, it is important that our management behaves and conducts as management accountable to the board.
The ability to scale up is hard. So the best model for us is concentrated India, diversified financial services, and through this, we can get significant scale on an Indian platform.
It is possible that the digital world may change the need for physical branches. We will continue to add branches incrementally, but we will reach a point - whether it is 1,500, 1,800 or 2,000 branches - where we will say enough is enough.
I am a great believer in Indian entrepreneurship. There is a whole set of people doing so many exciting things.
A lot of family members worked in the joint commodities family business. It was a classic case of capitalism at work and socialism at home.
I was not very keen on joining the family business... there were 14 family members working together, and it worried me that I would not have enough individuality.
We are going to position ourselves as a world-class financial institution. We want to do things that are comparable to the best in the world. At the same time, we want to have very strong human qualities.
Growth should take care of the fear of job losses. People will be challenged to do different things. For people who are not up to it, purely based on objective assessment, that's a different issue, which, you do it anyway.
If India grows steadily and does the structural things right and carefully unties knots, builds an institutional process which sort of cleans up the corruption and the baggage in the system, I see it as a wonderful marathon.
Historically, in India, the strange fact was that the equity owner was not taking as much hit as the lender. Therefore, if we restore the first principle of economics, that first the equity owner needs to take the hit and then the lender, we will get a good solution.
If you ask me, over time, I am a believer in the Indian financial saving story getting stronger; a lot more savers are moving money away from gold and real estate into banks, mutual funds, insurance and equities.
If what you create does not outlive you, then you have failed.
As we were all growing up, there used to be a very big mantra in India which was called 'export or perish.' There was a long period when we used to focus on import substitution.
A weaker currency is a national tariff. After we get a weaker currency, we have to take advantage of that. Or else, we will waste it once more in inflation and in the inability to raise competitiveness.
