ABOUT THE BOOK (INR395, 160PP)
The 1970s in India were dark times of high tax slabs, land sharks and black money. When loans were a last resort meant for emergencies and buying a house was beyond aspiration, possible only at retirement, nobody was willing to bet on the repayment capacity of the ignored middle class, except one man. This invisible class went on to become the primary potential customer base for Housing Development Finance Corporation (HDFC). The rest as they say is history.
While HDFC was Hasmukh Thakordas Parekh’s brainchild, it was his nephew Deepak Parekh who shaped it. Parekh left a comfortable overseas job with a plum salary and exclusive perks to join his uncle’s mortgage company at a 50 per cent pay cut. He nurtured HDFC to become India’s largest and cleanest financial conglomerate—not just in housing finance, but later in banking, asset management and insurance too.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
R. GOPALAKRISHNAN is an author, speaker and a corporate advisor. His career spans over 50 years: 31 in Unilever where he rose to be vice chairman, HUL, and later 19 years in Tata Sons as a director. He now serves as non-executive chairman of Castrol India, an independent director of Hemas plc, Sri Lanka, Executive-in-Residence at S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research, Mumbai and Distinguished Professor of IIT, Kharagpur. He has authored nine books so far, notably A Comma in a Sentence, Six Lenses and Doodles on Leadership.
VIDYUT LATA DHIR (PhD) is a Behavioural Scientist and Professor in Leadership, Organizational Behaviour and Design Thinking at S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR). She is a recipient of the Erasmus Mundus Scholarship by the EU and designs management development programmes across industries. She has initiated Vishwas for nurturing emotional well-being at work. Her research interest lies in exploring human factors in cyberspace, decoding life journeys and curating experiential innovative pedagogy.