Last year, when Arundhati Bhattacharya, former chairperson of State Bank India (SBI), India’s largest bank, messaged a group of friends to say she was now the chief executive officer (CEO) of software-as-a-service (SaaS) company Salesforce India, they thought she was pranking them. It was, after all, the first of April.
“I received a lot of smiley faces and ‘ha ha’s and I had to message them back to say it was no joke,” Bhattacharya tells me as we sit down to chat at Ming Yang at Taj Lands End in Bandra, Mumbai.
Her journey since has been well-documented as she