Legendary Indian actor Amitabh Bachchan talks to CNN’s Mallika Kapur about his new film “Pink,” which he hopes will start a movement where more men learn “No means No.” Watch the interview here.
Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan speaks candidly to CNN’s Mallika Kapur about the issues that matter to him. Watch it here.
Amitabh Bachchan, part of the first family of Indian cinema, is idolized by many — he opens up to CNN’s Mallika Kapur about how he copes with fame. Watch this part here.
This article was first published in Mint Lounge on Saturday, April 22, 2017
The CEO of Teach For India on making education accessible to all, the strength of her parents, and her own unfinished degree at Tufts University.
The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein is a classic children’s picture book about an enduring friendship between a tree and a young boy. In this tender tale, the tree keeps giving and giving to a boy who keeps asking for more as he grows up. There are various interpretations of this book—but most readers agree that ultimately, it’s a poignant story about giving and selflessness.
So I’m not surprised when Shaheen Mistri, 46, founder of Akanksha and the founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Teach For India (TFI)—both organizations focused on education—tells me it’s her favourite children’s book. Even before we meet for this interview, I have pretty much decided that a woman who set up a non-profit at the age of 20 to educate underprivileged children must be, well, selfless.
“I don’t think she ever thinks of herself that way,” says Mistri’s close friend and colleague of over 20 years, Nandita Dugar, who serves on the board of both Akanksha and TFI. “But she is one of the most selfless people I know.”
I meet Mistri for coffee at a café down the road from her home in Worli, Mumbai, where she is a regular. I have a feeling that many meetings are conducted here, over coffee and conversations—Mistri’s favourite things, one of her colleagues tells me.
Mistri seems embarrassed when I bring up her selfless nature. But since I find it hard to get inside the head of a woman who left a top-notch liberal arts education at Tufts University in the US to teach low-income children in India, I persist. This time, I probe her about what parents can do to raise selfless children. “I don’t know,” she replies. Then, a pause. “My own children are not in that space right now. Not yet.”
We go on to talk about other things but Mistri quickly brings the conversation back to my original question. She tells me what made a difference to her—her parents set an example.
“They always looked after other people,” she says, describing her father, a former banker, as a “rock” who helped people within their extended family, both emotionally and financially. Her mother was a speech therapist, so Mistri and her brother became familiar with children with special needs.
Mistri was born in Mumbai but her father’s transferable job meant the family kept moving and she attended a total of 10 schools. After stints in Lebanon, Greece and Indonesia, the family reached the US. There, Mistri attended a private high school in the wealthy suburb of Greenwich, Connecticut. The transfers were difficult for a “painfully shy child”, but they made Mistri value diversity and left her with an interesting accent that sounds like a blend of all the places she’s lived in.
Connecticut was a world far, far removed from India. To ensure the children didn’t forget their roots, the Mistri family would visit Mumbai every summer. And every summer, a young Mistri would volunteer at a school for the visually impaired, at an orphanage or any place that could do with an extra pair of hands.
“I didn’t like those trips to India at that time,” Mistri tells me, “but the seed was planted. I noticed the disparity. The inequality around me was glaring.” It is this polarity that would shape Mistri’s future choices.
Mistri came to Mumbai in the summer that followed her first year at Tufts University. One day, she was stuck at a traffic light near Nariman Point. A few children came running up to the car, begging. She recalls, “I remember looking at them and asking myself at that moment, why am I going back to the US? Won’t anything I do in India be more valuable than going back home?”
She called her parents, who were in the US, and told them she wasn’t going back. She’s still here, working on her dream to provide every child in India access to an education. Her parents have moved back to Mumbai too.
After leaving Tufts, Mistri enrolled for a course in sociology at St Xavier’s College, graduating in 1992. She convinced a group of college friends to volunteer as teachers and begged schools to let her use their empty classrooms after hours. Her tenacity paid off—the first Akanksha centre was born in 1991 at Holy Name School, Colaba. Fifteen children from neighbouring slums attended the first class that Mistri taught herself. She says she felt “every possible emotion ranging from helpless to exhilarated”. It was a start.
The centre soon evolved into the Akanksha Foundation. It now serves 6,500 children through three centres and 21 schools in Mumbai and Pune.
Mistri felt proud as she watched Akanksha grow but says it also brought on a feeling of restlessness. “After years of asking myself, what do I want to do, I began to ask myself, where do I need to be?” Mistri says, explaining that she felt a “crushing responsibility” to find a way to scale up what she was doing at Akanksha.
In India, there is an urgent need for it. Nearly one in four people here is below the age of 14. More than half the students in class V in government schools cannot read a class II text or do a simple math problem. There are 900,000 vacancies for teachers across primary and upper-primary schools all over the country. To address this, India needs intervention.
According to Mistri, that intervention is leadership. In 2008, she founded TFI, based on the proven model of Teach For America. It’s an extension of her work at Akanksha: The organization’s mission is to build a community of leaders who will work within the education sector to eliminate the inequality we see in it now.
It works on a two-part model. In the short term, TFI places outstanding college graduates and young professionals (referred to as fellows) in low-income schools to teach full-time for two years. During this period, they get exposed to the grass-root realities of India’s education system and, hopefully, are fired up enough to commit to a career in education. Many of TFI’s alumni do, and in the longer term, they work as teachers, principals, policymakers and curriculum designers who work towards the same goal—to educate all the children in India.
TFI, now funded by corporate donors, other foundations and high net worth individuals, is in its ninth year. It receives thousands of applications each year and has an acceptance rate of 8%. At present, it has 40,000 students, 1,200 fellows, 240 staff members and 1,500 alumni.
“She sets audacious goals. And then she just goes and does them,” says Dugar. “I remember thinking, why would anyone give two years of their life to Teach For India, but Shaheen’s done it, she’s pulled it off.” TFI has set one more lofty goal: It wants to reach one million children over the next five years.
Given Mistri’s formidable reputation, chances are she will get there. “She’s a visionary. But also someone who has substance and can execute,” says Fatima Agarkar, co-founder of Ka Edu Associates, a Mumbai-based educational management services company. “There are enough people out there who want to save the world. We need more people like Shaheen who are actively doing something, who are hands on,” she says.
I drop in at a dimly lit TFI class at the Worli Sea Face municipal school. Here, I find a fellow, Neha Gujar, 22, teaching class VI students. Around 40 boys and girls—children of drivers, domestic helps and daily-wage labourers from the surrounding slums—cheerfully jump up to greet me.
Gujar, who has a mass media degree from Jai Hind College, became a TFI fellow for a simple reason: She knows education can change lives. Her father comes from a poor family in Rajasthan. She tells me his prospects were bleak. But he managed to go to school and eventually joined the Indian Navy. The opportunity brought with it money, respect and a chance to educate his own children.
As a TFI fellow, Gujar earns Rs17,500 a month. “Compared to my friends, I’m not earning that much. Then I think about Shaheen. Her life. Her story. And I look at all that she’s achieved,” Gujar says. “That inspires me.”
Mistri still teaches once every 10 days and calls the classroom experience a highlight. “I don’t know any other role in this world where, whether you have had a good or bad day, you come into a classroom and you are just showered with love and acceptance by these kids. Being around the children, it’s hard to walk away and not say, what can I do a little bit more, a little bit better, for more kids.”
I linger in the TFI classroom and watch Gujar at her job. She shows me what her students are studying. Last year, none of them were reading at a level appropriate to their grade. Within a year, a quarter of the class is where it should be. Gujar looks satisfied. “Being a TFI fellow, I feel I am part of a movement working for India. Every day, when I wake up, I feel I have a purpose.”
It sounds like a rehearsed answer, but standing in the middle of that crowded classroom packed with eager faces in blue and white uniforms, I believe Gujar.
Remember all that talk about selflessness? I don’t ask this young TFI fellow, who will become a TFI staff member when she completes her fellowship, what or who drives her. This time, I am pretty sure I know the answer.
The master mariner, who founded a start-up after two decades at one of Asia’s biggest commodity trading firms, on Chinese hotels, Sunday dinners and god.
This article was published in Mint Lounge in March, 2017
Harry Banga always thought he would retire from a career in trading commodities when he turned 60. Much to his own relief, however, things didn’t go according to plan or he would have been at a loss for things to do. He tells me he has no hobbies. Banga, now 66, is immersed at work when we meet. His office is where he is happiest. It probably helps that it has a breathtaking view of Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour, dotted with ships.
The Amritsar-born, Hong Kong-based Harindarpal Banga—“Harry” to everyone who knows him—is the chairman and chief executive officer of The Caravel Group. “It’s a start-up,” Banga chuckles. But one with grey-haired managers, an experienced team, and a billion-dollar balance sheet. “We created something new,” Banga demurs. “That’s what a start-up is.”
A diversified global conglomerate, Caravel was founded in 2013 by Banga and his two sons, Guneet (37) and Angad (33). The Bangas own all of it. He says his sons, who were working elsewhere, forced him to start his own venture, promising they would join him if he did. Though both have leadership roles within Caravel, Guneet, who is the executive director, is currently on a sabbatical, working on philanthropic projects in Thailand. Angad, the group’s chief operating officer, plays an active role in the day-to-day operations and heads the asset manage-ment division.
Harry Banga made a name and fortune for himself over two decades at Noble Group, a commodity trading company based in Hong Kong. As group vice-chairman, he was widely credited with turning the company into one of Asia’s biggest business successes. He had joined Noble in 1989 to head its new shipping division. It was the perfect match: Noble could trade commodities and transport raw materials from suppliers to buyers. The timing was fortuitous. China’s economy was regaining momentum and the government was spending liberally on domestic infrastructure projects. It had a voracious appetite for raw materials. Banga quickly realized the impact an emerging China would have on the world stage, so that’s where he focused his attention. “I pretty much lived there, not in five-star hotels but in dirty, filthy, smelly guest houses,” he says, remembering the years he spent travelling to remote corners of China. “And the food was terrible.” It was rough, but he persisted, even picking up Mandarin during those years of travel and establishing key contacts within China.
“For an Indian national to be so respected, to have such ‘guanxi’(relationships) within China, is very rare,” says Sam Chambers, editorial director of Asia Shipping Media, which controls global maritime news portal Splash.
Banga left Noble in 2010. He doesn’t say much about why he stepped down, except that the way Noble was growing (“too fast”) and diversifying (“becoming asset heavy”) didn’t match his sensibilities. He continued with them as vice-chairman emeritus till their 2013 annual general meeting to enable a smooth transition.
His exit was well timed. Noble has been plagued by accounting problems, several high-level departures, and a downturn in the commodity market. The company is nowhere near the darling of the stock market it once was.
Rich with experience and cash from selling his stake in Noble, Banga set up Caravel. It is named after a small, nimble, 15th century sailing ship developed by the Spanish and Portuguese to explore uncharted waters. The business has three verticals: logistics, which includes maritime services such as ship management, commodities trading, and asset management. Asset management was introduced to attract Angad, who has a background in private equity.
In a little over three years, Caravel has put Banga back on the list of Hong Kong’s 50 Richest People, with a fortune of $1.02 billion (around Rs6,800 crore), according to Forbes magazine. Caravel, which posted a revenue of $80 million in its first year of operation, estimates a jump to $1.8 billion last year. Banga looks embarrassed when I talk to him about his wealth. “What means more to me is when they compare Caravel to companies that have been around for 50 or 80 years,” he says, adding, “At this age, if I have more than three drinks, the doctor’s bill is bigger than the drinks bill, so where will you spend the money?”
Later, I understand where the money goes—well, some of it at least. “I don’t fly commercial, I have my own plane,” Banga says in a matter-of-fact tone. “Sometimes I say, why should I go in my own plane? I worry about my carbon footprint. But Angad says, Dad, just enjoy your life.”
As we speak in his office, I can’t help but notice that the view makes a perfect backdrop to Banga’s story. He began his life on the seas. He was not really interested in an engineering or medical degree, the traditional career path for most Indian men with his kind of family background at the time, and a chance meeting with a family friend who worked for the Indian Merchant Navy piqued his interest. Growing up in landlocked Punjab, Banga had never seen the sea. Without telling his father, he applied for a position with the Indian merchant navy. An exam and an interview later, he was accepted as a cadet.
Banga loved his life as a seafarer. “It was the lure of seeing the world. You went to a port and stayed there for months. I loved it. Seeing new places, meeting new people. It was amazing.”
He went on to become a master mariner (a qualification that allows you to become the captain of a ship) and at 28, the youngest captain in the navy.
It was during his time on the sea that the young Sikh cut his hair. It was impractical, with all that travel and being on a ship, he says. Banga’s father didn’t allow him into the house for three years. “Three years,” he emphasizes. Even after they made their peace, Banga had to grow a beard and put on a turban before going to meet his father.
I meet Banga for a second time at a gurdwara in Hong Kong on a chilly Saturday morning. He is there with his family to attend an akhand path (continuous recitation of religious hymns). “I believe in god and god for me is Sikhism,” Banga says. “Being Sikh defines who they are, it’s a big part of their identity,” Angad says of his parents. I learn that Banga has donated $1.2 million to the gurdwara for a new building and is closely involved in the design as well.
I watch Banga mingle easily with others from the local Indian community. He’s a slight man with a towering personality, the recipient of the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman (the highest award given to overseas Indians) conferred by the then president, Pratibha Patil, in 2011.
Over the years, he has also developed a fiercely loyal inner circle of colleagues. The senior management at Caravel came with him from Noble. His secretary has been working with him for 30 years; the head of iron ore, for 25 years; and the head of his China unit, for 20 years. Perhaps his most endearing quality is his friendly disposition. He’s affable. Every morning, he walks the floor of his office at 10.30 and greets people personally. He has done this for 20 years. He has a monthly list of birthdays on his desk and doesn’t miss wishing an employee.
“It’s a we and us culture, never you, never me. At our Monday morning meetings, there’s no finger-pointing. If someone did something that cost the company, it’s we made a loss, never you made a loss,” says Angad. He credits his father’s leadership style—based on developing trust—for creating a family-like atmosphere in the office.
For Banga, nothing in the world is more important than family. I understand that within minutes of meeting him. He talks often of his father, a former civil servant, now 95 and ailing. Banga returns to New Delhi frequently to visit him. His wife of 37 years, Indra, goes through the day’s schedule with him before he comes to office. She has chosen all the art that is displayed in the office. His daughter-in-law Dana (Angad’s wife) works at the Caravel Foundation with Indra.
The family gets together for Sunday-night dinners. It’s not just a tradition, but one that is “sacred”, Angad says. If anyone can’t make it, there had better be a very good reason for it. It doesn’t matter that they have seen each other in office every day, all week. Sometimes, he’s kind of old fashioned, laughs Angad. “There’s so much pressure on my wife and I to have children. He’s like, all my friends have grandchildren, I am the only one who doesn’t!”
Speaking about the next generation (and a potential third), I ask Banga what he would like his legacy to be. He seems puzzled. I haven’t really thought about it, he responds. I rephrase the question. How would he like to be remembered? Banga pauses. Finally, he says, “I think I would just want someone to say, I miss him having a drink with me.” In case you are wondering, that would be single malt whisky.
This article was published in Scroll.in on March 8, 2017
On Sunday mornings, whatever the weather, a group of boys grab their bats and run out of their homes to go play cricket with ‘Imran Sir’. There’s no proper field in the neighborhood, so they play where they can find space. In this case, it’s a patch of land above a water tank that doubles up as a soccer field. There’s nothing unusual about this style of community cricket, except for one thing. They’re playing in a city that pays very little attention to the game: Hong Kong.
“That may be the case,” says Imran Idrees, originally from Pakistan, now a cricket coach in Hong Kong, “But for this group, (pointing to the ten boys doing batting drills) it’s in their blood.” We inherit our love for cricket,” Idrees adds.
And so, it’s fallen on a group of cricket fanatics in Hong Kong – children, parents, coaches, players and team owners – most of them South Asian, to fight a desperate battle to keep cricket alive in the territory.
Though the first recorded cricket match was played in the colony in the 1840s, cricket has never been Hong Kong’s game. There are only 800 registered players in the densely populated city of 7 million and almost all the players are South Asian, British or Australian.
“It’s a bit of an unknown,” says Tim Cutler, the 34-year-old Australia born CEO of Cricket Hong Kong. “It has a long history of being known as an expat sport.”
The Chinese haven’t taken to it, preferring to concentrate on the globally popular sports of football and rugby instead. Locals are so befuddled by the sport, the official website of Hong Kong Cricket has a ‘What is Cricket’ section with a handy video explaining, among other things, the 11 different ways to get a batsman out. To the locals, it’s just too complicated.
“It wont be, if we expose them to it,” says Urvashi Sethi Sodhi, one of the forces behind the T20 Blitz, a Hong Kong cricket league, the second edition of which starts on March 8. Its five teams boast of an impressive roster of overseas players for such a young tournament. Pakistani heavyweight Shahid Afridi and England fast bowler Tymal Mills will play for the Kowloon Cantons franchise part owned by Sodhi – and eight other women and a man. The owners of all five franchises are South Asian.
The participation of high profile international players has created a great buzz around the sport in Hong Kong. The challenge however, will be to pack the stadiums. Sodhi admits the audience numbers ‘were in the hundreds’ last year though online viewership was much higher. The tournament is hoping to draw greater numbers this year. This would be a lot easier and a lot more lucrative if the local Chinese community was excited about it. Even better, if they played it.
A big obstacle is accessibility. Space is a premium plus the topography of the island means there simply aren’t enough fields. There is just one ground approved by the International Cricket Council for international tournaments.
“In India or Australia, people are playing cricket all around and it’s easy to join a team. Here you don’t see kids playing it. You have to seek it out,” says Cutler who isn’t waiting around for locals to come to cricket grounds. He’s taking cricket to them instead. Last year, he introduced a fast track Junior Sixes cricket program in a dozen local Chinese schools and says the response has been terrific.
The Junior Sixes is an offshoot of the Hong Kong Sixes – a popular cricket tournament that returns to the territory this year after a four year gap. Like the T20 Blitz, it’s a simplified, short and fast version of cricket which new audiences should find easier to understand than the traditional format of the game.
“Chalo, chalo, lets play,” shouts Imran Sir to his group of boys as he resumes his training session. But there’s one more thing, he has to say before I lose him to the makeshift pitch again. “In South Asia, parents think their kids can have a great future playing cricket because they’ve had role models in an Imran Khan or Sachin Tendulkar. There are no sports heroes here for kids to look up to.”
What Hong Kong does have – despite the lack of facilities, scant Chinese interest and a step sport status compared to other sports – is an impressive national cricket team. The men’s team currently stands at number 14 in world T20 rankings making it Hong Kong’s highest ranking major sports team internationally.
“The quality is extremely good for the number of people that play it, it,” says Sodhi, whose son is in the national squad, a pool of 25 players that feeds Hong Kong’s national team.
“It’s a small community but a proud community,” says Cutler of cricket in Hong Kong. “If we could get more of the locals to join us, it could really bring the territory together over a common love.”
The banker-turned-businesswoman and Nykaa CEO on nail enamels, taking risks, and how she built a Rs280 crore cosmetics and wellness company.
This article was published in Mint Lounge on March 24, 2017
When Falguni Nayar walks into a brightly lit Nykaa store in Mumbai’s Infiniti Mall, where I’m waiting to interview her, I scan her face quickly for make-up. After all, that’s why we are meeting—to talk beauty. Clearly, I am less subtle than I think. “I love make-up but I don’t have time to put it on any more!” she laughs loudly. The 54-year-old founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Nykaa, a Rs280 crore cosmetics and wellness retailer, is simply wearing a nude lipstick and kajal.
Founded in April 2012, Nykaa started as a multi-brand online beauty retailer but has since extended its presence through a mobile app and brick-and-mortar stores. Think of it as India’s Sephora (the French multi-brand cosmetics retailer). At present, Nykaa has four stores, one each in Delhi and Bengaluru and two in Mumbai. To go pan-India, it plans to open one store every month from next year.
Nykaa is a young company but Nayar herself has been a force in the Indian business world for more than two decades. A graduate of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, she spent the bulk of her career—over 18 years—at Kotak Mahindra Capital Co. When she left in 2012, she was the managing director and head of its institutional equities business. But, Nayar says, “I have always been an entrepreneur first.”
Nayar was born and raised in Mumbai, where her father ran a small bearings company, assisted by her mother. The household chatter revolved around investments, the stock market and trade. “Plus, I’m Gujarati,” she deadpans. Entrepreneurship is in her blood.
Straight out of business school, Nayar started her career as a management consultant. Her husband Sanjay Nayar, whom she met at business school, took a job in finance. He is now the CEO of global investment firm KKR India. Nayar says taking the professional route was easier since it allowed both of them to have transferable jobs.
But the entrepreneurial bug kept gnawing at her.
A few years ago, when her children (twins Anchit and Adwaita) left to study in US colleges, Nayar found herself with time on her hands. “Once I turned 50, I thought I would become complacent,” she said. It was very hard to quit the job at Kotak, “where everything was going right”, but with the self-imposed deadline of 50 looming, Nayar did just that.
Later, as we settle down for coffee at a Starbucks outlet, Nayar—dressed in a grey sari with gold accents (saris are a weakness) and delicate diamond earrings (another weakness)—relaxes into a corner couch and I start getting a sense of what drives her. “I’m an adventurer,” she says. “I was never a good swimmer but I would always be the first to jump in. The thought, what if I break a leg?, doesn’t occur to me.”
So when all the naysayers (and there were plenty) said India wasn’t ready for an e-tailer selling, of all things, beauty products, Nayar chose not to see the risks. Instinctively, she knew what women wanted. And she knew the number of Indians shopping online was about to explode.
According to management consultancy Technopak, though e-tailing currently accounts for only 1.5% of the overall retail market in India, it is growing at breakneck speed and will make up over 5% of Indian retail by 2021.
“Full marks to her for getting the retail story of India right,” says Ankur Bisen, senior vice-president, retail, consumer products and e-tailing division of Technopak. The principles of retail are simple, he says: Curate your products and know your products. And Nykaa appears to have done both really well.
Nykaa sells more than 35,000 products from 650 brands, both international and Indian, luxury and mass, and is constantly adding new labels to its stock. Last year, it brought global premium brand Estée Lauder on board, making MAC cosmetics available online in India for the first time. “It took a call on the personal care category and went deep into it. It didn’t get distracted. That’s how a retailer succeeds,” says Bisen.
Two years ago, Nayar introduced her own brand—and it has gone on to become a best-seller.
The company’s revenue has grown 350% in the last two years. In 2016, it raised a total of Rs104 crore from investors and the company hopes to break even by the end of this summer. An initial public offering is planned for 2020.
According to the company, it receives 15,000 orders a day, mostly from consumers between the ages of 22 and 35, who have disposable income and an interest in good grooming. Another attraction is the content—online make-up tutorials and product reviews are a great draw. But let’s face it, the main reason for shopping at Nykaa is accessibility.
“There was a time when women would come down to Delhi from Punjab just for a beauty shopping trip. Or they would ask a cousin to bring back a particular lipstick from a trip abroad. Now they can just order it online,” says Vasudha Rai, a former beauty director at Harper’s Bazaar, now a blogger at Vbeauty.co and columnist with The Hindu.
For those who know her, Nayar is a role model. For those who don’t, hers is an inspiring story. She’s a woman with a formidable career path and a closely knit, supportive family. It leads me to the inevitable question: Does she believe in the philosophy that a woman must “lean in” to be successful?
“Yes,” she replies. “I don’t think there is any glass ceiling. Women need to commit,” says Nayar.
Aware of the push and pull of family life many working women face, she says there’s no race. “If you need to take a few years off, you can come back. But when you come back, you need to be committed because you reap what you sow.”
Her daughter Adwaita, 26, recalls the early years of elementary school and says it wasn’t always easy to have a working mum. “I missed her! I would call her non-stop and disturb her in meetings,” she says.
As Adwaita grew older, she understood the choices her mother had made. “Today she’s my most important source of inspiration. She never really dwelt on whether one part of her life was being underserved and in the end it definitely all balanced out,” she says. Adwaita, who helped her mother launch Nykaa, is going to resume work there after she graduates from Harvard Business School this summer.
“Enough” and “done” aren’t words in Nayar’s business vocabulary, says Pratima Bhatia, a brand consultant who has worked with Nykaa, adding, “She never stops, even when she has exceeded expectations.” Once Nykaa had established itself as a multi-brand beauty retailer, Nayar decided to tweak the business model by introducing her own brand, Nykaa, in 2015. First up was a line of nail enamels. The range has since expanded to include kajals, lipsticks, body mists and lotions, among other items.
“It was a response to gaps in the market,” she explains. The beauty salon she frequented did not stock the popular OPI nail-polish range she liked. “They would have four colours of one brand, some from another. The whole experience was terrible,” she says. Research showed that part of the problem was with Indian import regulations, which made registering new colours a lengthy and tedious process. Nayar realized a domestic manufacturer didn’t need to go through that process, so if she made nail enamels, she could get them to the market quickly.
The strategy worked. Nykaa’s own nail colours sell 8-10 times more than the next best-selling nail brand on its website. According to Rai, it’s because of a “combination of good rates and cool colours”.
As we stand in front of a kaleidoscopic display of 120 nail colours at a Nykaa store, I’m drawn to a neon-green one. It’s called Key-Lime Slush. A coral-colour one is named Cherry Pop. I ask Nayar if she chooses the names. Yes, she says, it’s fun.
She shows me the top-selling nail enamel. It’s a charcoal-grey one called Squid Ink Mousse, which retails for Rs199.
And no, she doesn’t have Squid Ink Mousse at home. She prefers floral shades.
All of a sudden, Nayar pauses. She’s found a bottle of ink-blue nail varnish. The Nykaa branding in black is indistinguishable against the dark background. I can see it bothers her. She immediately asks a sales associate to notify someone in her office to fix it. “Retail is all about the detail,” she says, and when you are Nayar, every detail is a big deal.
Before we part, I ask her one last question: Why did she name the company Nykaa? “Because nayika means you are the actress of your life,” she says, smiling. I have no doubt Nayar is relishing her current role.
This video was published in September, 2016 on CNN. You can watch it here.
I had a pretty ordinary childhood in the Indian city of Kolkata. I was part of a happy, healthy, close knit family. My sisters and I went to school, played some sport, hung out with our friends.
When we could, we tagged along with our mother when she did volunteer work. It had the reassuring rhythm of a routine life. Back then, I had no idea I was witnessing history, and the work of a saint, taking place.
My mother was, and still is, part of a group called the Co-Workers of the Missionaries of Charity.
It’s a community of local volunteers – largely women, of varying age and from different religions – who assisted Mother Teresa, and now her group of nuns, in any way they could.
My mother would go to Nirmala Shishu Bhavan, Mother Teresa’s shelter for abandoned babies and children, to tutor children who were being adopted by European families.
It would be helpful, the nuns felt, for them to know a little English before they started a new life abroad. Often, I’d go along with my mom and practice conversational English with them.
Each time, I was struck by a board outside the dormitory that listed the number of children inside.
There were always many more girls than boys – a stark reflection of India’s preference for boys over girls. As one of three daughters myself, it used to – and still does – fill me with sadness and disgust.
Yet, I remember feeling relieved at the same time. At least the babies who made it to Mother Teresa’s homes were being cared for and stood a chance.
I saw firsthand how well they were cared for – by the volunteers, the nuns and Mother Teresa herself.
Little, but a powerhouse
It was common for me to run into Mother Teresa at Shishu Bhavan. She was often just there – cradling a sick baby, feeding a child, patiently engaging a toddler tugging at her sari.
She was little, but a powerhouse of energy, darting from one end of the house to another with quick steps. I remember her deeply wrinkled face and sparkly eyes with which she made intense eye contact when she spoke to you. She had a tremendous presence.
As clichéd as it sounds, when she was in the room, it had a different energy.
Loreto House was my own school and run by the same order Mother Teresa was part of before she founded her Missionaries of Charity. There, she was often the subject of many conversations, art, essay and poetry competitions. I once wrote a poem on her, which my mother handed to her. The next time I saw Mother Teresa, she beckoned to me.
“Come here, come here,” she smiled and said, “I want to show you something.” She led me to a statue of Mary at Shishu Bhavan and there above it, was my poem – framed. By that, I mean, a sheet of paper with the unsure handwriting of a school student, inserted into a clear plastic packet, taped to a wall.
Then she did what she would always do, clasp my hands tightly in hers and say, “God bless you my child, God bless you”.
When people hear I am from Kolkata, which used to be known as Calcutta, the usual follow up is a knowing nod and, “Oh, Mother Teresa.”
Yes, it’s a city that’s become synonymous with Mother Teresa and as a result, instantly conjures up images of poverty, desperation, despair. It’s known for its slums and squalor. That hurts.
But, it’s also going to be known as the city that produced a saint. As a Calcuttan, I’m proud of that.
This article was published on CNN Money on February 28, 2017
The head of India’s top state-owned bank says the country has good reason to be worried about President Trump.
“We’ve been… watching along with the rest of the world,” said Arundhati Bhattacharya, chairwoman of the State Bank of India. In an interview with CNNMoney on Tuesday, Bhattacharya said that there was “a lot of concern” in India about recent developments in the U.S.
She cited three main reasons.
Trade
“The U.S. is one of our major trading partners,” Bhattacharya said. Trade between the U.S. and India was $109 billion in 2015, according to figures cited by the United States Trade Representative last October. Both countries have said they want that to grow to $500 billion in the years to come. Trump’s “America First” agenda could derail those plans. The president has urged American companies to bring jobs and manufacturing back home. So far that hasn’t stopped companies such as Apple, Tesla and Boeing from expanding — or planning to expand — their Indian operations. And unlike Mexico and China, India has not yet been on the receiving end of Trump’s ire on trade. That’s no guarantee it won’t be.
Interest Rates
Interest rates set by the U.S. Federal Reserve are “very material to the way things happen in the rest of the world,” Bhattacharya added. A hike in interest rates by the U.S. central bank — like the one it enacted in December — can suck money out of emerging markets such as India as global investors take advantage of higher yields on U.S. government bonds. Fed officials have said they will raise interest rates slowly. But Trump’s plan to spend heavily on infrastructure could fuel U.S. inflation, forcing the Fed to move faster. Higher U.S. rates can push the dollar higher against currencies such as India’s rupee. That could help Indian exporters but would hurt companies that have borrowed in dollars, and could push up Indian inflation. India is a major importer of oil — which is priced in U.S. dollars. With another rate hike expected in March this year, India will likely be watching the Fed with some trepidation.
Visas
India’s most immediate worry when it comes to the U.S. is a possible crackdown on work visas like the H-1B. “We do have a lot of people who work in the U.S.,” Bhattacharya said. The Trump administration has said it intends to make changes to the H-1B and several other programs, potentially shutting its doors to thousands of Indian engineers in the process. Stocks of Indian outsourcing companies — the top beneficiaries of H-1B visas — took a nosedive when reports of changes to the program emerged, and Indian engineering students now appear to be rethinking their U.S. plans. The fatal shooting of an Indian engineer in Kansas last week has added safety concerns to the mix. But Bhattacharya echoed Indian tech leaders, who say the U.S. needs immigrants to keep its economy running smoothly. “One of its major strengths has been its openness, and that has attracted the best of talent from the rest of the world,” she said. “I don’t think they’re going to give up that advantage in a hurry. Let us see how things pan out.”
Virat Kohli: ‘I play cricket with dignity and passion’
CNN’s Mallika Kapur sat down with Virat Kohli, one of the biggest – if not the biggest – names in modern Indian cricket. You can watch this part of the interview here.
Quick-fire questions with Indian cricket god Virat Kohli. CNN’s Mallika Kapur puts Indian test cricket captain Virat Kohli on the hot seat here.
This article was published on CNN.com on September 29, 2016
Mumbai, India (CNN)Bollywood mega star Amitabh Bachchan is redefining pink. If that makes you think of ribbons and dolls, Bachchan latest film may make you change your mind. In Bachchan’s view, the color stands for courage.
“Pink” is a gripping courtroom thriller in which Bachchan plays a lawyer representing three young women who are the victims of unwanted sexual advances. In a highly charged scene, Bachchan questions his client about the incident. “What did you say?” he thunders. She replies: “I said no.” No means no, the lawyer repeats in the courtroom. Those three words are resonating across India, a country that’s trying to fight rampant sexual violence against women. Bachchan says he stands by all the dialogue in the film. “No is an entire sentence in itself,” he says. “No means no and when somebody says it you need to stop. And the woman could be your friend, your partner, your girlfriend, or a sex worker, or even if it’s your own wife,” he tells CNN.
The message has struck a chord with the Indian public. Social media is full of stories of people leaving the cinema halls feeling empowered.
“Tears still rolling down. So moved. Such a powerful film,” tweeted the Bollywood singer Shreya Ghoshal. Even the men aren’t holding back. “Congratulations on creating such powerful cinema,” tweeted the cricketer Sachin Tendulkar. “What a fantastic film and an even more important message.” The film mirrors several uncomfortable truths in Indian society — the pressure women face for the clothes they wear, for the time they come home at night, and for being independent. “‘What will people say?’ Is a feeling every Indian girl grows up with,” says Bachchan.
Bachchan recently wrote a letter to his granddaughters that was the subject of much debate in India. It was an open letter to all young women in India, with the basic message that young girls should have the confidence to be themselves. He urges them not to let others dictate their lives for them. “Because you are women people will force their thinking on you, their boundaries on you. They will tell you how to dress, how to behave, who you can meet and where you can go. Don’t live in the shadows of people’s judgement. Make your own choices in the light of your own wisdom.”
In our interview Bachchan said he strongly supported pay parity – even if he was making less than his female co-stars. Bachchan admitted that he was paid less than his co-star Deepika Padukone in the movie “Piku” since she was the lead character — a bold revelation from the man who is idolised by a nation of a billion people. As with many Bollywood films, “Pink” ends with justice being delivered – victory. Will it create real change in India? Perhaps that is an ambitious goal. But it is shining a light on a pressing issue. It’s engaging the country. It’s creating a conversation around ‘no means no’. And for a country that has been in the news for many a gruesome rape story, that’s a big win.