Quotes from Chanda Kochhar

Every entrepreneur, whether man or woman, should start with a robust business structure.

It is important always to make full use of opportunities that come your way, and at the same time, it is important to not just cope with the challenges but try and convert each challenge into an opportunity.

It's about maintaining balance. Plan better, be organised. I chose to be a working wife and mother. Why should I compromise on either?

We actually probably do nothing very special for women. But what we do in a very special manner is to remain an absolute gender-neutral, merit-based organization.

ICICI has been a meritocracy. So, a huge amount a lot of responsibilities, big roles, challenges, have been given to women, not because they are men or women or so on, but they were just given to people who have - who the organization believes has the capability to perform.

What women need are not benefits and advantages but a merit-based selection process that will allow them to automatically benefit from various opportunities.

The restructuring theme can be of various kinds. Some amount of debt gets serviced out of cash flows, some gets back-ended and resolved with sale of non-core assets of the company, and some debt gets converted into equity which might today look like a haircut.

As far as the banking industry is concerned - and I am sure it must be true for various industries as well - is that the only thing that is constant is change. Your business models are changing, the customer demands are changing and the regulations are changing constantly.

I believe in fate, but I also believe that hard work and diligence plays a very important role in our lives.

The real underlying value comes if you can put a company back into a running state and it becomes a successful viable entity if it continues to repay loans.

As far as employees are concerned, clearly I like to communicate with them, since we are more than 40,000 people. I like to communicate either through e-mail or through video conferencing, which we do very often, and stream out videos and interviews. But more than that, I believe in traveling to my branches.

Only if you aspire for more will you achieve more.

What's important is that we see each year what the opportunities are, and make use of the opportunity.

Getting small things like Visa or driving licence should be made easier as we, in financial service sectors, are dealing with financial regulations and tax constraints.

Our approach on lending has always been that we will lend to India-linked assets, because that's the risk that we understand, and that is the business that has been doing very well.

Mark-to-market losses are not real loss. It's a notional loss.