The SBI Story: Two Centuries of Banking

THE State Bank of India (SBI) was established in 1955, but the story of its being began two centuries ago. The Presidency banks of the 1800s — the Bank of Bengal, the Bank of Madras and the Bank of Bombay, set up by the British to facilitate trade and the repatriation of remittances to England — were its forebears. ‘The SBI Story’ by Vikrant Pande narrates the compelling circumstances that prompted the founding of the Presidency banks, how they fared back in the day and why they coalesced to emerge as the Imperial Bank in 1921, which came to be the SBI. Pande, majorly a translator from Marathi to English, traces the SBI’s connection with India’s economic progress, and the bank’s proactive approach to change and reinvent itself to meet the needs of a growing nation. A good read for anyone interested in business and economic history.

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IN 2020, the annual population growth was down to under 1 per cent. Only 31 of 100 Indians live in a city today and just 5 per cent live outside the city of their birth. As recently as 2016, only 4 per cent of young, married respondents in a survey said their spouse belonged to a different caste group. Every 10 years, we have Census enumerators gathering information on the crores that inhabit the country. From time to time, we have surveys cramming our news. Numbers enlighten, empower, elevate. Numbers can help us make sense of modern India, but numbers lie too, or are made to. In ‘Whole Numbers and Half Truths’, data journalist Rukmini S draws on two decades of on-ground reporting experience and uses numbers to interrogate and reimagine India. She brings in data — some of it never reported— to create a blueprint to understand the changes of the last few years and the ones to come.

WHAT does a journalist take back from his many assignments? News reports, for sure. But beyond that lie human stories that stay on long after the newspapers have been published, junked, recycled. In ‘Slow Boat on the Irrawaddy’, Yogi Aggarwal, who has been a reporter since the mid-Seventies, brings together some of the essays and articles he wrote for various magazines from those travels across South Asia and elsewhere. Whether it is China, Burma and Cambodia or Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan, he goes to the bottom of things to show the workings of people and the choices they face amid the larger issues that circumscribe their lives. While most of the pieces in this collection are reflective of the troubled times these were written in, some are leisurely reads too. Falling in the category of travel writing, these are real accounts of people and places.