IMA Insights

Your columnist traces his roots to the Paliwal Brahmins of Rajasthan’s Thar Desert, a once-prosperous community that turned the sands of Pali into farmland and bustling trade. Their abrupt exodus centuries ago, driven by excessive taxes and the cruelty of rulers, left over eighty villages deserted. 

Many migrated to other parts of Rajasthan, UP, Punjab, Haryana and the Himalayan foothills, carrying with them the habits of enterprise that had made them flourish. Some, drawn to the ascetic spirit of western India, embraced Jainism and spread further across the subcontinent. What was lost was not merely a people, but a finely balanced economy. Their story endures as a warning that when political greed overwhelms productive energy, even the most resilient societies can wither into dust.

The attached podcast explains. 

India’s cities, once symbols of ambition, are now choking under filth, traffic and civic neglect. The solution will not come from politics but from enterprise. A “Clean Cities Compact” could unite business groups, local chambers and civic volunteers under a common banner to fund pilot projects, benchmark urban performance and publicly rate municipalities. 

City leadership awards and transparent audits, modelled on corporate disclosure standards, could shame or celebrate performance. The aim is not to replace government but to compel it to function, backed by business skill and sustained public pressure. Only then can India’s cities become places where people wish to live, not merely work. This podcast explains.

Continuing our series on India’s merchant classes, this week’s column turns to the Armenians, who arrived during the reign of the Great Mughals. Scattered at first, they later anchored themselves in Calcutta and Madras, then the twin capitals of British India’s trade. A small community remains in Calcutta, but most departed around Independence, to Britain, Australia and later Armenia after 1991.

Your columnist, while at school in Asansol, remembers a few Armenian classmates, pale-skinned and brown-haired boarders from Calcutta, who spoke Bengali and Hindi with ease and were as Indian as the rest of the lads. Like the Chinese of Tangra, they were as Indian as the rest of the lads

These essays aim to trace how such merchant communities, foreign in origin but Indian in spirit, shaped the country’s commercial and architectural fabric.

The relationship between India and the United States will, in many ways, define the fate of the Western alliance and the balance of power in the decades ahead. Washington’s turn to transactional behaviour risks undoing years of careful diplomacy and mutual trust. India, for its part, has drawn its red lines and held firm, signalling a new maturity in foreign policy. 

 As the West fumbles and China courts India, New Delhi's choices will shape the architecture of the future world order. Pakistan, ever opportunistic, remains a sideshow. The real contest lies between America, India and China, each now testing how power and patience can coexist in a restless new age. 

This podcast explains.

In an environment where volatility is unrelenting and risks extend well beyond finance, the remit of the CFO has become that of an enterprise risk leader. At a recent India CFO Forum session inMumbai, Rajeev Gupta, CFO of L&T Technology Services and Surendra Goyal, Global CFO of Birla Carbon, drew on decades of experience to examine how organisations can strengthen resilience. They highlighted that the real task for finance leaders today is not only to manage balance sheets but to anticipate shocks, eliminate known risks, prepare for the unknown and embed risk awareness deep into organisational culture.

The attached podcast summarises these discussions, but briefly:

• Today’s CFOs are enterprise risk leaders, tasked with anticipating and mitigating financial, operational, regulatory, ESG, cyber and reputational shocks.
• Known risks (compliance, forex volatility, credit exposures), can be eliminated or controlled. Unknown ones (pandemics, regulatory shocks) demand planning, contingency reserves and cultural readiness.
• Building resilience requires balancing speed and caution: when to respond instantly and when to pause, gather intelligence and avoid fuelling misinformation.
• Effective risk management is about mindset and culture as much as systems. 
• Resilience stems from diversification—of supply chains, investors, financing structures, even information – allowing organisations to withstand disruption.
• CFOs hold a central role in shaping organisational culture, training frontline leaders and embedding risk awareness across teams.

In an age where volatility has become the default and hierarchies are flattening under the weight of technology, leadership must shift from command-and-control to collaboration and influence. At a recent joint session of the India CEO, CFO, CHRO and CMO Forums in Delhi, Shiv Shivakumar, Operating Partner at Advent International, drew on decades of experience leading some of India’s most recognised companies to outline how leaders, Boards and organisations must reinvent themselves.  He emphasised that the future would belong not to managers who issue directives but to leaders capable of fostering collaboration, cutting through complexity and anchoring resilience.

The attached podcast summarises these discussions, but in brief:

• Leadership in the 21st century is being shaped by volatility, with uncertainty rising in both frequency and magnitude.
• Companies that anticipate change significantly outperform the laggards; agility and foresight are now the decisive differentiators.
• Organisations must move from vertical integration and over-management to flatter structures, horizontal careers and true leadership rather than instruction.
• CEOs face shorter tenures, greater regulatory oversight and rising pressure to build personal brands, making authenticity, courage and collaboration indispensable.
• Boards must shift from passive oversight to active value creation, aligning themselves with strategic pillars and contributing domain expertise.
• Sustainable leadership rests on self-accountability, honest conversations and building collaborative cultures where dissent fuels progress. 

In an era where work is being reshaped by automation, AI and fluid workforce models, the role of leadership is no longer simply to manage people but to design the very architecture of talent. At a recent India CHRO Forum session in Delhi NCR, Antony Alex, Founder and CEO of Rainmaker, argued that the real challenge lies not in choosing between technology and talent, but in weaving them into a symbiotic whole. Drawing on his expertise in corporate governance and workplace ethics, he highlighted how the human cloud era demands organisations that balance efficiency with empathy, and algorithms with distinctly human strengths. His central message was clear: theCHRO is uniquely placed to architect the blueprint for the workforce of the future.

The attached podcast summarises these discussions, but briefly:

• AI will free up human capacity, but sustainable advantage will lie in creativity, empathy and purpose. 
• The paradox is not tech vs talent, but how to design a symbiotic model where automation and human capability reinforce one another.
• Workforce structures are shifting: from headcount to capability architecture, static roles to fluid skills and full-time employees to blended ecosystems.
• Generational divides, digital-native impatience versus legacy-system experience, demand rethinking feedback, communication and social bonding.
• Efficiency must be balanced with well-being, autonomy with algorithm and dashboards with ‘human signals’.
• CHROs are uniquely placed to architect this future through transparent communication, learning cultures and co-creation.

In a world where competitive advantages erode faster than ever, the pursuit of leadership is no longer about scale or dominance but about sustained distinctiveness. At a recent session of the India CEO Forum in Mumbai, Shishir Joshipura, former MD of Praj Industries, set out a compelling case for treating innovation not as a toolkit but as a cultural anchor. He argued that true growthemerges when organisations stop chasing quarterly wins and instead build systems that outlast individuals. Innovation, in his telling, is the lever that enables businesses not merely to play the game better, but to rewrite the rules altogether.

The attached podcast summarises these discussions, but briefly:

• The true race for organisations is to be unique, not number one; sustained advantage comes from creating distinctiveness that is hard to replicate.
• Leaders must build for perpetuity and optionality, looking beyond quarterly results to ensure resilience and long-term relevance.
• Innovation is a mindset and culture, not a tool; embedding it as a core value is essential to drive systemic change.
• Active listening to customers, cross-disciplinary collaboration and employee pride form the bedrock of an innovation ecosystem.
• Innovation can be incremental, disruptive or breakthrough in nature. 
• Leaders must personally champion the latter two while creating systems that tolerate and learn from failure.
• For MNCs, the guiding principle is to be local as much as necessary, global as much aspossible; speed and action bias often matter more than consensus.

Across industries, transformation remains a constant ambition. Yet for CFOs, the hidden force that shapes its success is how organisations unlock value at speed and scale. At a recent India CFO Forum session in Bangalore, Dr Raghav Narsalay, Partner at PwC India and Head of the company’s Research & Insights Hub, unpacked how PwC’s 'Value in Motion' framework can equip Finance leaders to expand beyond their core intelligently. 

With his deep experience advising global companies on competitiveness and growth strategy, Dr Narsalay offered a practical perspective that aligns India’s evolving economic context with a CFO’s imperative to steer growth, manage risk and reshape their organisations for the future. The attached podcast summarises these discussions, but in brief:

• Value is shifting from static, industry-specific siloes to dynamic, human-centric domains shaped by AI, ecosystems and geopolitical shifts.
• PwC’s ‘Value in Motion’ framework helps CFOs identify where to play next across 9 key domains. 
• Intelligent diversification demands orchestration of external ecosystems, new capital discipline and trust management.
• CFOs must reframe core competence, define the job to be done, bridge capability gaps and audit technology to avoid hidden costs.
• A deliberate approach to entry, execution and exit strengthens ecosystem trust and long-term advantage.
• The CFO’s role is evolving: from cost gatekeeper to architect of intelligent capital and resilient partnerships.
• Unrelated diversification is becoming mainstream across Indian firms, not just conglomerates, driven by technology convergence and valuation pressures.

The rise of Jardine Matheson owed as much to Bombay as to Britain. Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, a Parsi merchant , supplied the cargo, capital and connections that William Jardine needed to build his “Noble House.” The Parsis of Bombay were not mere middlemen; they were global traders. From cotton and tea to the darker commerce of opium, families like the Jeejeebhoys, Readymoneys and Wadias tied Canton to Bombay.

They spoke Gujarati at home, did business in English and haggled in Cantonese in China’s ports. Their networks spanned continents, their fortunes bankrolled philanthropy and their imprint shaped both Hong Kong and Bombay. Today their numbers have thinned, but a portrait of Jeejeebhoy still hangs in Jardine’s headquarters and serves as a reminder that globalisation was never a Western monopoly, but also an Indian enterprise.

This podcast explains.