By Tarunkumar Singhal, Raman Jokhakar, Chartered Accountants
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In the gloomy economic environs of a falling rupee, slowing economy and a general drift of things, an easy way to shirk responsibility would be to lay the blame at Greece’s door. Former ICICI Bank chairman N. Vaghul would strongly recommend not to rummage through the ruins of the Athenian economic Acropolis to explain our problems away.
“No one is going to believe if we say our problems are because of Greece. Our problems are self-inflicted”, says the celebrated banker, reasoning that the “root cause of India’s troubles lies in a decline in its values”.
“It isn’t a question of some fiscal, inflation or some other problem like a fall in the value of the rupee. It doesn’t have to do with the change in recent times in our tastes with regard to music, clothes, marriage or some social mores. Those are irrelevant. What is hurting is that our core values are disappearing and it has been six decades of decline with the political, economic and industrial leaderships dropping in integrity,” he says. Blending his characteristic wit with banking analogy, Vaghul says,
“the root cause of our financial crisis is that we have created derivatives without underlying assets,” referring to the decline in values in all spheres of life. Holding forth on the importance of upright leadership at an event here to remember banking stalwart and former SBI chairman R. K. Talwar, Vaghul said work ethics ought to be the cornerstone on which to build careers and industry and that the decline in values witnessed all around reminded one of the importance of the philosophy of those like Talwar, who thought everyone was an instrument of the divine.
