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.