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The reticent rule. Or so believes Vikram Thapar, the 50-year-old Managing Director of KCT & Bros, who opted out of BILT's boardroom race in favour of cousin Gautam, 38. A food-freak and an angling aficionado, Vikram now plans to combine his hobbies by exporting prawn curry from the prawns cultured in Waterbase-his prawn cultivation venture-to West Asia. Scuttlebutt has it that Vikram is busy collecting lip-lickin' recipes, filing them away in his Psion 5 hand-held computer for posterity. Admits the shy Vikram: ''I am a self-confessed foodie, and enjoy collecting recipes from all over...'' So, slurp!, do we. |
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They constitute India's
champion cosmos. The quartet of HLL's K.B. Dadiseth, Infosys' N.R.
Narayana Murthy, HDFC Bank's Aditya Puri, and the NSE's Ravi
Narain, that is. Having made it to the BusinessWeek's Stars Of Asia list for
their commitment to work in the wake of the Asian Meltdown, the (already-) famous four
have done India proud-once again. While Dadiseth, 52, Murthy, 53, and Puri, 48, have won
laurels for their companies' splendid performances, NSE's Narain, 44, has been recognised
for morphing a languishing loss-maker into a prime profit-machine. ''We are constantly
dissatisfied, and never sit back and rejoice. We are restless to do even better,'' was all
that the ever-ebullient HLL head-honcho, Dadiseth, told BusinessWeek. Talk about modesty,
man... 
From a blaze of modesty to a dash of nobility.
Another quaternary-foursome is handsome, isn't it?-comprising the rest of the Who's Who of
India Inc.-ICICI's N. 
Vaghul, ICI's A.S. Ganguly,
Tata Sons' Ratan Tata, and M&M's Keshub Mahindra-have
made an appeal to Mumbai's business community to support UNICEF's Project Pratham.
Initiated in 1993-94, and instrumental in providing pre-school education to more than
50,000 deprived children and running 28,000 balwadis, Pratham is a city mission with the
objective of achieving universal primary education by 2000. Says the 64-year-young Vaghul:
''The literacy-rate was a piece of data that I used while talking macro-economics. That
has changed ever since I got involved with Pratham.'' Nobility, as you may know, is the
geometric progression of generosity... 
Believe it or not, generosity and savings (can) go hand-in-glove. Just as Usha
Chandrasekhar has demonstrated. This 40-year-old Director of the Small Savings
& State Lotteries Department of Andhra Pradesh could teach financial whizkids a thing
or two about mopping up savings-generously. The unassuming Usha has, in her own demure
way, led the hi-tech state to another revolution, working incessantly, conducting
training-programmes for agents, paying commissions on a quarterly, instead of annual,
basis...phew! Adds the never-say-die Usha: ''We now want to use infotech to improve our
effectiveness-say, communicating the features of our schemes through multimedia
presentations.'' But why small savings? Pat comes the reply: ''Investors are flocking to
government schemes since they have lost faith in finance companies.'' The figures, well,
tend to agree with her: upto February, 1999, small savings collections crossed the Rs
1,000-crore mark to touch Rs 1,010 crore. This year's target? Rs 1,500 crore. Only. ''We
are on course,'' she says, matter-of-factly. Right O', lady!... 
Woman power is in. She's the
better half at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). But ask the 37-year-old Gayatri
Sondhi-a partner at the consultancy-about how she feels about being a demographic
minority, and she'll shrug it off as no big deal. A 15-year veteran at the BCG, based in
NY, Gayatri is a post-graduate from our desi DSE (Delhi School of Economics). Beginning
her journey with the BCG as an associate based in Boston in 1984, before moving on to the
Big Apple in 1989, this ''hands-on student of economic enterprise'' has seen it all. On
sales-calls with milkmen, on movie-sets with the moguls, in operating theatres with
cardiac surgeons, and in boardrooms with the CEOs. Quips the multifaceted matron: ''In all
this time, and across 5 continents, I have never come across a business I didn't like.''
And we haven't come across a consultant like this either... 
Let
men say what they will. Women, women rule them still... Just one day before dashing off to
Manila to attend the annual Asian Development Bank meet, Lalita Gupte,
50, broke the glass-ceiling. Becoming the first-ever woman Joint Managing Director and coo
of the ICICI is an accolade that she has received in recognition of the exemplary
managerial skills she has exhibited during her tenure as the institution's executive
director for 3 years. Opening her account with the ICICI 27 years ago, she has had the
privilege of working under the late S.S. Nadkarni as his executive assistant. A finance
and marketing MBA (Class of 71) from the Jamnalal Bajaj Institute, her peers know Lalita
as a woman in a hurry. As the ICICI morphs into a universal bank offering a range of
financial products and services, it is Lalita that it can bank on... 