To do or not to do? With so many options, and so many people judging you for every choice you make, what do you choose?Today’s women are asking. Times have changed from earlier black & white life of men work, women take care of house to the technicolor life of today but all that glitters is not gold. Can woman straddle a 10-hour job, bring up the kids and also don the topi of wife? The woman who has shone like Gold proving her mettle is Chanda Kochhar, CEO of India’s ICICI Bank. She along with Shikha Sharma and Naina Lal Kidwai has made a mark in the Indian banking industry.
She comes from education-oriented family. Her father, Prof. Roopchand Advani,was a principal at Malaviya Regional Engineering College at Jaipur. Her father died when she was just 13 and then her mother decided to shift to Mumbai along with her three children to be with extended family. She graduated from Jai Hind College in Mumbai with Economics and then did her MBA from Jamna Lal Bajaj with specialization in Finance. It was at Jamnalal that she met Deepak, first her batchmate and then life partner, and K V Kamath.
The defining moment in her career at ICIC came when she was asked to head the retail operations after running the corporate business. When ICICI set up a commercial bank in 1993, she only an assistant general manager, was chosen by N Vaghul, then ICICI chairman to lead a team to decide the architecture of the bank , an experience she reckons was invaluable. She guided the company successfully before being tapped to lead India’s second-largest bank in 2009, during the height of the global financial crisis. She says “New tasks will be unknown. You learn, grow and evolve.” She is widely acknowledged for her leadership, has been named a Woman of Power and received the Padma Bhushan . She says “My passion lies in the pursuit of excellence – can I do it very well, better than others?”
Chanda Kochhar has a son Arjun and daughter Arti , an engineer. Kochhar has balanced family and work for three decades. “You often feel as if you are walking a tightrope,” she says. But all this has meant extraordinary hard work and having to live with the guilt conscience that every working mother suffers. “There is no past tense to guilt conscience. I have been living with it every single day — even now,” she says. Chanda Kochar has been hands-on mother. Her daughter says “For me, my mom is just my mom. I don’t recollect a single morning of my life when my mother has not woke us up for school, no matter where she was. We didn’t know what alarm clocks were! She always attended to my health, when needed, and was present at our Parent Teacher Meetings. She beautifully combines the conventional act of being a mother at home, and a professional at work”
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