What I was told by my parents was that, you know, take this inhibition out whether you're a girl or a boy. Basically, pursue your dream, and as long as you're a capable and hardworking human being, you will be able to follow and fulfill your dream.

Two eyes are given for a reason. One eye to always look at the opportunity. The second eye to always keep looking at the challenges. Because if you don't balance both, it's very easy to get carried away one way or the other. And it's when you balance the two that you find the most sustainable model.

Our parents treated all three of us - two sisters and a brother - equally. When it came to education, or our future plans, there was no discrimination between us based on our gender.

I was only a young girl of 13 when my father passed away from a sudden heart attack, leaving us unprepared to take on life without him. We had been protected from life's challenges so far. But without warning, all that changed overnight.

She worked hard till she saw all of us through college and we became independent. I never knew that my mother had such a wealth of self-assurance and belief within her.

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.

Lending has come back in retail; it has come back in working capital. It has also come back in other forms, like government contract being given out to companies.

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

Successful strategic vision lay in the fact that we visualized the retail business to be much bigger, ahead of what others thought it to be.

Our focus is more on secured retail business like housing and car loans. While we will do some unsecured loans - credit cards and personal loans - we will do it primarily with existing customers.

We believe that rural India is going to be the next driver of growth. You cannot make money overnight there, as you have to set up infrastructure there; the value of transactions is lower - you need a few years before you can really make all those businesses profitable.

Every quarter, we need to see the portfolio and follow the accounting practice of mark-to-market that values investments according to the prevailing market prices and at the price at which they are made.

We don't understand the equity market well, and so we deploy funds in fixed-income securities, and like any other securities, investment in those securities also need to follow the mark-to-market accounting principle.

Mark-to-market losses are not real loss. It's a notional loss. What we can monitor is the credit quality of the underlying papers. Are the companies paying interest on time? Is there any deterioration in the credit quality of these companies?

We are monitoring the global companies on a daily basis, and their rating continues to be investment grade. We will take immediate action if anything goes wrong.

We have always said that over the medium and long term, we will disinvest some part of our holding in our major subsidiary companies, and life insurance is our largest subsidiary company.

If you look at the numbers from 2002 to 2016, we have consistently been market leaders. We have followed a well-articulated strategy, and our focus is to continue that strategy.

The consolidation that we started in 2009 was clearly the requirement of that time.

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.

We have to address impediments that stall implementation of projects and streamline the process to ensure smooth execution going forward. We need to address the leverage levels among corporates to restart investment cycle.

When we in our sector talk of the adoption of Indian consumers to new products and innovative ways of doing banking, they always exceed our expectations.

In India, we have the opportunity to give innovation the kind of scale that no other country in the world can. Innovation is a necessity.

India did not innovate with the ATMs. But when we brought ATMs into India and made the machines talk in 15 regional languages to the people in rural India, we got millions of transactions on the ATM.

If you take existing ideas and make them affordable and scalable, you substantially change business models. India lacks an education system that is research- and creativity-oriented.

Power projects are differently placed to road projects. There's difference stress across different companies across different groups based on their leverage levels.

My belief is India's banking industry will continue to grow at two and a half times the GDP growth rate.

We need to take the country in the right direction, whether it is around administrative policy decisions or legislative changes or ensuring the macroeconomic stability.

The increase in coal production and the efficiency in coal movement are all administrative things that can add a lot to the economic growth.

As far as discom reforms are concerned, they have to be a combination of two parts. One is the existing balance sheet and, therefore, taking care of that. The second important is the reduction in losses going forward.

The MBA entrance exams are so quantitative-oriented that it keeps out more and more women from joining the MBA classes. If we were to make the entrance exams more all-rounded, you could see more participation.

We believe the new banks will complement the existing banking system, and there will be opportunities for players to identify mutually beneficial partnerships.

The scope of activities for payments banks mainly includes acceptance of demand deposits, issuance of ATM/debit cards, payment and remittance services, and distribution of third-party products.

Payments banks can also act as business correspondents of other banks.

Rather than worrying about entities, we should worry about the trends in technology that may cause disruptions... if we get so paranoid that banking is no longer going to exist and banks are going to get disrupted, I think that is a different worry.

Only if you aspire for more will you achieve more.

Practise and practise to make your dreams turn into reality.

I thought work and family complete life. Aarti's enthusiasm and energy levels made me realise that life can be even more wholesome and fuller.

I use my interaction with both my kids to know how the youth today relates to technology, their expectations in terms of mobility and social solutions by customer services-oriented businesses like banking.

I believe that India's long-term growth story is strong, and foreign investors are keen to be a part of it.

ICICI Group has always been a catalyst in India's growth and continues to support the country in every sphere.

Life is too short to miss out on the beautiful things like a double cheeseburger.

I'm not a political person. When I start to get into it, it just upsets me. I feel so powerless when it comes to politics. So I've just decided to be non-political and very, very pro-soldier.

I read so slow. If I have a script, I'm going to read it five times slower than any other actor, but I'll be able to tell you everything in it. It kills me that there are standardized tests geared towards just one kind of child.

It's really hard for men to tell other men 'I love you' without putting a 'man' at the end of it. Like, 'I love you... man.' You just can't look at another man and say, 'I love you.'

I just love cake, confetti cake, to be specific. It has little colored candies inside the cake, and then you get the confetti icing, which is really hard to find sometimes. It's really hard to explain to people, because it's not icing with sprinkles on top. It's icing that actually has candies inside of it. It's Funfetti icing.

The more you try to look sexy, the lamer it is, so you just have to commit to the comedy.

I think all jocks have a sensitive side. It's just, will they show it to anybody? Will they let their guard down and stop being tough and the cool jock guy around their friends, or just relax? I don't know if it's best to say opening up, but just relax and really say what you're actually thinking, and not what you think people want to hear.

I don't know what you're going through life doing if you're not really trying to collect some really great memories.

My dad was a roofer when I was young. I believe he owned his own roofing company in Florida. And then he fell through a roof, broke his back. Permanently. I mean, he's not paralyzed or anything, but he's had to deal with pain for all of his life since then.

Someone who doesn't take herself too seriously and can be a goofball. Because everyone's a nerd inside, I don't care how cool you are.