1.1 Introduction

In any modern economy, dealing with banks has become an integral part of everyday life. Bank offices or branches are a familiar sight in marketplaces in cities and towns. The setting up of automated teller machines (ATMs) as a form of extension of bank branches has further expanded the presence of banks. Not only urban centres and small towns, but even the rural parts of India today are no longer unfamiliar with banks and banking. It is quite common for the general public to avail ordinary banking services like obtaining a bank loan for business or farming, operating a savings bank deposit account, taking a home or automobile loan, using a credit or debit card or making or receiving small denomination payments using the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). The reader may have some exposure to banks and banking activities in her day-to-day life. However, not everyone may be quite aware about the technical aspects of banking operations and the banking business. Many may not have adequate understanding about various types of assets and liabilities of banks and the technical details related to various banking products and functions. In this chapter, we provide the basic details about a bank and its activities to facilitate a comprehensive understanding of the banking business. The objective is to provide a formal introduction to banks and banking in the Indian context.

Section 1.2 describes ordinary banking services in the form of opening bank deposit accounts, facilitating financial transfers and extending loans. In the process, a typical bank acts as an interface between savers and borrowers. The bank is a legal entity incorporated under the law of the land. The legal provisions in India defining banks and banking functions are also briefly discussed.

The opening chapter sets the scene for the remainder of the work with a detailed account of the flood traditions of the ancient world. It begins with the story of Noah and the flood as it occurs in the book of Genesis. It then traces the origin of the Biblical story in the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh (thirteenth–twelfth century BCE) and the Babylonian Noah Uta-napishti. It then outlines how these flood traditions were appropriated within the early Jewish and Christian traditions. This is followed by an account of Greek and Roman Flood stories and how they were seen within the ancient world in relation to the Biblical and Mesopotamian traditions. Consideration is also given to Noah as ‘the man of righteousness’ in the New Testament, his role in the Jewish Sybilline Oracles (early first century BCE), and in the literature between the Old and New Testaments.

The story of urea stibamine is itself worthy of recording as a dramatic medical break-through which may be related…. A Bengali worker Dr U. N. Brahmachari, himself a chemist, was producing various products which he was testing on kala-azar cases. The Government Director of research programmes under the aegis of the Indian Research Fund Association, Colonel G. D. W. Greig IMS, asked him to send these to me to test at my special kala-azar hospital in Shillong, the capital of Assam. Among others, he sent me a product he called ‘urea stibamine’ which he had tried and merely passed over with a formal favourable comment. When I tested it I found it was so effective that cases could be treated and cured by about eight doses instead of taking many weeks or even months and then with unpredictable results.

To begin with, the question as to who Upendra Nath Brahmachari was can be addressed by referring to the remarks of Nilratan Sircar, an outstanding medico of Bengal. While presiding over a meeting of the Calcutta Medical Club, held on 20 September 1923, he said,

Brahmachari (see Figure 7.1) was one of the medical superstars, and an unsung hero, in the fight against one of the dangerous enemies of public health in the British Empire in India. The process of defeating this disease may be said to have been started with the introduction of tartar emetic by Leonard Rogers, and it reached a height of success with the availability of Brahmachari's brainchild, urea stibamine.

Taking its lead from Darren Aronofsky’s film ‘Noah’, the Epilogue shows how the legend of Noah and the flood has greater relevance in the present moment than any other legend in Western thought.

10.1 Introduction

In Chapter 9, we discussed management of banking assets such as bank loans and investments. Broad considerations on profitability, solvency and liquidity guide overall strategic decisions on the volume and type of bank lending and pricing of loans. Operational decisions related to items on the liabilities side of a bank's balance sheet are equally important and are covered in this chapter.

During the post-reform period, banks assumed adequate operational autonomy as regards deposit mobilisation and fixing of interest rates on deposits as well as exploration of several sources of borrowings. This has created a highly competitive environment for mobilising deposits by attracting customers through aggressive marketing and pricing strategies. Banks are heavily reliant on borrowings not only for day-to-day liquidity management but also to raise capital from the market for meeting tier-2 capital requirements under the Basel norms.

OBS items such as bank guarantees, LCs, acceptances and endorsements have been offered by banks in India to facilitate trade and business. Contingent upon failure of the counterparty to honour the underlying transaction, any OBS item can become an effective liability. Hence, such items are popularly referred to as contingent liabilities. These items are not real bank liabilities as long as they are not crystalised. During the post-reform period, not only has the volume of transactions in traditional OBS items like bank guarantees and LCs significantly multiplied, new financial derivatives mainly pertaining to foreign exchange (forex) contracts have also become very popular. Given the importance of OBS items in the banking business in recent times, this chapter also briefly discusses management of these items.

There have been competing and conflicting ideas about diseases in different phases of human civilization, and none of them is said to be exclusively deterministic and universally acceptable. Disease has been defined in a way society wanted it to be defined, and consequently, the concept and ideas of illness are found to be changing with the changes of time and culture. More importantly, an interpretative rather than positivist approach to determining the definition of disease or illness has also been given by historians, sociologists, and anthropologists. This book is not intended to revisit this area and re-examine it. Broadly speaking, disease may be, in the light of modern medical research, due to several groups of causes, and specific aetiology for a specific disease has been established after the discovery of germ theory. It may be due to congenital defects or faulty working of the organs or may be the result of improper nutrition. There are certain diseases caused by some microbes (viruses, bacteria, or parasites), which are communicable from one person to another. This is the most important category of diseases from the point of view of public health services because these diseases can be prevented, and many can be successfully treated. Many such diseases, which caused havoc in colonial India, still pose a serious threat to the state and the people.

The most panic-inducing disease in British India was fever, which, in one form or another, had taken millions of lives. Besides mortality, fever also caused thousands of cases of illness, leaving the affected people weak, listless, and wrecked. British India experienced various types of fever, such as Burdwan fever, Dumdum fever, malarial fever, and so on—black fever, known as kala-azar (visceral leishmaniasis), being one of the most dangerous among them. Kala-azar was widely prevalent in colonial eastern India but was not only an Indian disease. It was rather a widespread disease and occurred in many parts of the world during the period under study, exhibiting its presence in China, Arabia, Sudan, Central Africa, Tunis, Sicily, Italy, Algeria, Crete, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Malta, Turkestan, Central and South America, South Africa, and so on.

This chapter begins by exploring the interpretations of the story of Noah in Rabbinic Judaism from the third century CE onwards to the end of the first millennium. It demonstrates how the rabbinic interpretations of the story of Noah took precedence over the Biblical account, as the rabbis engaged with paganism, Christianity, Gnosticism, and Islam, adapting their reading of the Hebrew Scriptures to the cultures that surrounded them while they told and retold the Scriptures. The chapter demonstrates how the Noah story in the Qur’an, derived from the Biblical one, remains the bedrock of Islamic readings. And, like Christian and Jewish interpreters, where the Islamic commentators found gaps in the Qur’anic account, they filled them in, and where they found difficulties, they clarified them, sometimes by drawing from the details in the Genesis story and in the rabbinic tradition.