Head to head!

She “hates scolding him all the time” and he in turn hates “being scolded”. Given the chance Shikha Sharma packs away all his old books, but trust Sanjaya to surreptitiously cart them off in his briefcase and create a mini library in office. The regular married couple? Not quite.

Shikha is the CEO of India’s third largest bank while Sanjaya is the CEO of one of the biggest custom e-learning companies in the world. In their personal life, they’re happy being joint CEO’s. “He decides that we need to go for a holiday and I take it on from there since I’m good at planning things and I like to do it for him and the kids. But all the big decisions regarding work and family are always taken jointly,” says Shikha.

While neither is seen on the society circuit much, it’s mostly because they have little energy to spare after office and home. “But my kids complain that they are getting too much of their dad,” laughs Sanjaya. “Both my children (son Tilak, 20, and daughter Tvisha, 17) are grown up now and they have their own lives.”

But Shikha agrees that when both parents are working, it’s difficult to give as much time at home as they’d like.  “When my son was two years old, he used to cry everyday when I used to get ready for work. I used to tell Sanjaya ‘okay, this is my last day. I won’t work from now’. But as they grew older, they understood that mummy really wants to go work and also wants to come back to them.”

Now both of them are keen to help encourage first-time entrepreneurs. “Organisations like Tie are helping entrepreneurs take that first step. We particularly want to encourage women,” signs off Shikha.