K V Kamath, chairman of ICICI Bank, thinks India is a land of opportunity and this is the time to choose the business of aspiration. In this interview with The Indian Express Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta on NDTV 24x7’s Walk the Talk, Kamath shares his faith in the robust Indian banking and corporate system and makes a case for a growth rate of 10 per cent

•You’ve heard expressions like ‘in the eye of the storm’, or ‘a near-death experience’. My guest this week is somebody who has been through all that exactly at this time last year. K V Kamath, welcome to Walk the Talk.

It was a bit like that but we were always sure of ourselves. I think the global situation was a bit unnerving and I think it is natural that people thought that the world was coming to an end. And the world doesn’t come to an end that easily.

•But describe the eye-of-the-storm feeling. Take us back to the Lehman Brothers’ collapse, Merrill Lynch’s collapse.

I think several things happened. Frankly, three things happened in sequence. You first had the commodity price correction, and before that you had the market challenge, and these two were weighing very heavily on the minds of everybody in business, whether it was corporate India, or whether it was the markets, the financial services business. I think you have to look at it in that context. It caused what I’d call a psychological challenge more than a practical problem. You had complete loss of confidence in corporate India. And it is not unusual that you will see that loss of confidence would also trickle down to the masses. I think that’s what we were seeing at that point of time, but I must say that the government acted at great speed and made sure that systemic challenges need not surface. So I would give a lot of credit to the government.

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