Uday Kotak

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.

In equities, you price the risk. As far as debt is concerned, if the markets get more sophisticated where, for the levels of risks that you take, you get the debt returns, we will certainly look at it. It's back to a philosophy of risk-adjusted returns.

There is socialism in the family that conflicts with meritocracy. And that bothered me.

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.

I am a great believer in Indian entrepreneurship. There is a whole set of people doing so many exciting things.

We are extremely focused on building some of the assets which are going into mid-India, semi-urban and rural, and that's our DNA. We are building a retail bank, and a lot of the deposit base is still in urban India.

The trouble with opportunity is, it never announces when it comes. It's only after it's gone, you'd realize that you missed it.

A lot of our fiscal deficit went to fund consumption and really did not get used to build investment and infrastructure. The trouble is, you can get a spurt in GDP growth, which may not be sustainable. I would much rather build the gradient of a long-term marathon.

What we have to be careful is that if we drop interest rates where the rate of interest is lower than inflation, then savers will not put money in financial savings and move it to gold and real estate, which is bad for India.

If you look at the history of large financial institutions, most of them have succeeded because of a deep presence in their home market.

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.

For me, the real thing is make, serve and list in India. Which means we need manufacturing, we need services, and we need financial markets.