The art of leaning in

Indomitable: A Working Woman’s Notes on Work, Life and Leadership

Author: Arundhati Bhattacharya

Publisher: HarperCollins 

Pages: 336

Price: Rs 599

It’s been raining books on State Bank of India (SBI), of late. Former SBI chairman Rajnish Kumar opened the floodgates last October with his autobiography The Custodian of Trust , and then came The SBI Story by Vikrant Pande in mid-November. Many may find it hard to digest another book on SBI just two months later, but that would be a mistake. For, SBI’s first woman chairman has come up with a delightful account of the gripping journey of a small-town woman to the corner office of the country’s largest bank.

Indomitable doesn’t offer any great intellectual insight into the working of the bank or the country’s economic and financial landscape. It’s not a tell-all book either. Unlike her successor who didn’t shy away from calling a spade a spade in his book, Arundhati Bhattacharya has carefully avoided talking about the uneasy relationship between a public sector banker and the government or the banking regulator. That’s a pity.

Instead, Ms Bhattacharya has written a book that is more about herself rather than SBI. There is nothing wrong in that as long as the author knows the art of telling an interesting story and presents a common-sense approach to successful women professionals.

The author sets the tone of her memoir in a dramatic first sentence: “I may never have been born at all.” Unemployment had forced her father to have second thoughts about having a third child, but her mother changed her mind at the last minute because she believed that the new-born would come with his/her own destiny. During her childhood, when she wanted to know the meaning of her name, her mother pointed at a star in the sky and said, “Arundhati is one who is unstoppable”.

Ms Bhattacharya has more than lived up to her given name and her book is refreshingly frank on the difficulties for a woman to have a career and a family, which includes an only child with learning disabilities. She talks about how she was on the verge of quitting her career but decided to hang on, even if that often meant a 21-hour working day (leaving home for Mumbai at 4 a m and returning by last flight which got her home at 1 a m). Some of the most poignant moments in the book are about her relationship with her daughter and the constant challenge to find an “integrated school” every time she got transferred. At the end of it all, the struggles were more than worth it: On her birthday in 2017, the author says, she got the best gift of her life. At midnight, her husband and daughter crept up behind her and placed a printout on the file she was reading. It was her daughter’s college bachelor’s degree!

The bias against women in general finds many mentions in the book. In fact, the bias is engraved in the legislation as the SBI Act refers only to a chairman, which is why she had to scrap her first batch of cards that were printed as chairperson. Though SBI started taking women probationary officers from 1960, there were no separate washrooms for them till decades later. There’s more. For example, she could not pursue medicine even after qualifying for a medical seat following the joint entrance examination as there were no hostels for women even in the seventies. And SBI was initially hesitant about offering challenging assignments such as e-credit to women officers like her.

Women bankers have a lot to thank Ms Bhattacharya for. Among many things, she ensured a two-year sabbatical for women employees for child and elderly care and convinced the government to give two Saturdays off each month, while making the other two full working days.

One of the strong messages of the book is that all professionals — whether men or women — would have to take charge of their own fortunes instead of wallowing in self-pity. For example, as general manager, she was once put in charge of new business in the area of custodial services. It was perceived to be an iffy project and a ploy to side-line her just a month before promotion interviews. It was a new initiative, so no space was allotted to her. Undaunted, she located an empty cabin and made out her nameplate on a piece of A4 paper and taped it to the glass door.

Ms Bhattacharya also knows how to laugh at her own expense. Towards the end of the book there is this delightful account of her excitedly telling her husband that she and the Queen were on the list of most powerful women in the world, only to have her husband text back saying the Queen would be on the list for life, while she would be off it as soon as she retired.

One interesting sidelight is about the birth of the bank’s superapp YONO. Ms Bhattacharya writes she fully endorsed the idea of a marketplace model first suggested by B Sriram, then managing director of National Banking Group, and that YONO was launched a month after she retired due to implementation delays. In his book, however, her successor, Mr Kumar, has a different take: It was not easy to convince the senior management. “The intense debate culminated with an obvious question from the bank’s chairperson, Arundhati Bhattacharya: ‘Are you sure we are not taking on too much?’” he recounts. Maybe one has to wait for another SBI book to give credit to where it is actually due.