Shobha Warrier has been associated with Rediff from its inception and currently works as Senior Editorial Director. She is also the author of five books in English, Battlefield India: 25 years of Politricks and Economix, Dreamchasers: Entrepreneurs from the South of the Vindhyas, Dreamchaers: Women Entrepreneurs from the South of the Vindhyas, His Days with Bapu, and The Little Flower girl and Others- A diary of a journalist. Her three Malayalam short story collections include Jalavidya, Meghana and Ramakundam. She won the Lalitambika Antharjanam special award in 1996 for her book, Jalavidya. She likes talking to people and listening to their stories! You can e-mail the author at shobhaw@rediff.co.in
In this interview with Rediff.com's Shobha Warrier, Ashok Kumar E R, the CEO and co-founder of Scripbox shares some more interesting observations about the way Indian women make financial decisions and offers advice on how, with the apt guidance and information, they could do a lot better.
'Businessmen are reluctant to invest because there is a fear that private investors are being targeted by various agencies.'
'Ultimately, people will revolt at one time or the other.' 'You cannot feed the public with cultural issues forever.'
'Only when China treats India as an equal can we consider them real friends.'
'There is no senior bureaucracy functioning now; these people only obey.' 'This is only a command and control kind of governance.'
'Till now, we were under tremendous stress. The economy was not recovering, the financial cycle was not moving and the banks were not supporting.' 'With the government pumping in money to the banks and asking the NBFCs to give priority to the MSME sector, there will be a revival.'
'The last time we had such a late withdrawal of monsoon was in 1960 or so.'
'We have the geographic advantage, demographic advantage, we have the necessary technical skills.' 'We just have to get all of these together. Then, we can very well compete.'
'The August phenomenon of decline in sales occurs every year.' 'What they have done cleverly is, using the economic slowdown as an excuse, they want a package from the government to compensate the expenditure they will incur while converting BS4 to BS6.' 'That's why they are making a hue and cry.'
'After people died when banners fell on them, I decided to file a case to make it a law to prevent people from doing this.' 'Till today, I have filed 150 cases against this menace.'
'If Chandrayaan 1 had a launch with GSLV, we need not have an orbiter for Chandrayaan 2.' 'We could have gone straight round the moon and landed on the moon.'
'When you look at it from the point of view of science, Chandrayaan 2 is a big success.'
'The worst is over, but it may take a couple more years for the banking system to re-establish the growth process.' 'Banks are the major pillars in an economy's revival.' 'Without banking operations and lending, revival will not happen.'
'If credit is not available, people will postpone buying. That's what has happened.'
'The government is sincerely working on employment generation. Unfortunately, they are depending on these people from Harvard. Their wrong policies are killing jobs. The government has to come out of the Western framework on which they depend upon a lot.'
'We are in the reverse gear and we are not there anywhere compared to the rest of the world'
'The IAS officers are after the rich people, the IRS officers are after the middle class and the IPS officers are after the poor. This is the new varnashrama created by the bureaucracy.'
VG Siddhartha's story 'will be a good case study and not a deterrent to those who want to be entrepreneurs. I don't think it will scare young entrepreneurs. I think these cases will make them sensible. They will understand that they have to be very careful about certain things, otherwise, they will have to pay a heavy price.'
'What Siddhartha's life teaches us is something very true about life; that life is a circle, and what goes up will come down. What is on top today will come down tomorrow, and what is down will go back to the top.'
'More than 1,000 start-ups are created from colleges, and more start-ups are coming up every year.'
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