Indian banking's one-time golden girl cautiously steps back into the limelight

In her Netflix documentary, "Martha," the American billionaire and tastemaker Martha Stewart says, "I have two mottos: Learn something new every day, and that when you're through with change, you're through. Move on." Their personal stories may be different but Stewart and Chanda Kochhar have shared a similar arc of heroic rise and a steep fall.

- Meenal Baghel

MUMBAI: Both have been nationally known figures who faced inglorious exits from their respective companies over allegations of fiduciary impropriety, followed by jail stints.

But since we now live in an age of Hollywood iconography which demands that redemption be the third arc, Chanda Kochhar, Indian banking's one-time golden girl and now its cautionary tale, is attempting a comeback in public life. Like Stewart, who at 70-something, chose her comeback through a Comedy Central Roast, Kochhar, 63, has planned her return through that medium beloved of Gen Z—the podcast. She launched her show 'Journey Unscripted' earlier this month, with Harsh Mariwala, founder and chairman of Marico, as her first guest.

"I have always believed that people's lives, their journeys are a huge source of learning—the way they handle challenges and their triumphs. To understand how people deal with situations—and not just what they went through—is something that can be a huge source of learning, and I wanted to take these to a larger set of people," she says when asked about the impetus behind the podcast.

Unlike Stewart, a media star who understands the let-it-all-hang-out brassiness required for comeback narratives, Kochhar alternates between tentativeness and reticence when it comes to talking about her almost cinematic life and career. To most questions in this interview her answer was a shake of the head and a plea to switch off the recorder. At one point she even said she would not like the name ICICI used anywhere in the copy.