The intensive media trial of ICICI banK chief executive Chanda Kochhar for presiding over a committee of this blue-chip private sector bank which granted huge loans aggregating Rs.3,250 crore to Videocon Industries in 2012-15, after which the latter had paid a Rs.391 crore consultancy fees to a firm promoted by Kochhar’s husband, and reluctance of the board of directors of Axis Bank to renew the term of its CEO Shikha Sharma, has prompted a recall of disappointing experiences with successful women who have risen to high office in the corporate and media domains. Throughout a long career in law, industry and the media, your editor has championed gender equality and affirmative action in favour of the country’s historically short-changed women in all fields of endeavour.
As editor of India’s pioneer business magazines (Business India and Businessworld), I celebrated the appointment of Vinita Bali to a senior position in Coca Cola, USA in the 1980s and her steady ascent up the executive ladder thereafter. But when she was appointed the Bangalore-based CEO of Britannia Industries from which this tiny organ is published, dozens of letters and phone calls remained unanswered. Likewise, the Harvard-educated Naina Lal Kidwai, CEO of Hongkong Bank, whose son I taught to play squash.
Similarly, a mild suggestion in a review of her long-forgotten smutty novel Starry Nights to the effect that she could have provided a deeper insight into the movie production process in Bollywood, prompted celebrity novelist and columnist Shobha De to comprehensively trash my novel Succession Derby (1991) — as yet the only authentic and credible corporate novel — and cut off all social relations. Ditto career counsellor Usha Albuquerque and journalist Tavleen Singh — friends of several years. The transformation of these once charming women into rude, embittered Hindi soap opera-style mothers-in-law, raises disturbing questions as to whether the so-called fair sex is equipped with the temperament and life skills required for high office.
These are just a few examples of women friends suo motu-turned foes. A mysterious reverse alchemy.