The first thing that took me by surprise about my interview with Madhu Kannan, the CEO of the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) was the timing of our chat. “Can you be here by 8.25 am?” he asked. Sure, I replied and cameraman, Sanjiv, and I reached his plush office right on time.

It had taken around 3 months and an endless number of emails and phone calls to the BSE’s press office to confirm a date and time for our interview. It was frustrating to keep chasing them – I put it down to Indian bureaucracy and poor time management, unfortunately still typical of many large Indian companies.

“That’s one thing I am trying to change,” said Kannan when we interviewed him. “I want to start meetings on time and change the culture so no one’s late for meetings.”

It’s just one of the many, many challenges Kannan has ahead of him.

His big task: To revamp the BSE and make it relevant again.

At 37, he’s the youngest CEO of Asia’s oldest stock exchange. It’s an exchange that needs help.

While it had a virtual monopoly over stock trading in India, the entry of a rival exchange – the National Stock Exchange in the early 1990’s – changed that. The BSE now handles only a fraction of all trading done in India. To compete more efficiently, it needs to invest in better technology, says Kannan, who also has plans to make the BSE a one-stop shop for investors looking to trade across multiple platforms.

Sure, Kannan may get the BSE back on its feet. However, the real challenge for any stock exchange in India – be it the BSE or the NSE  – is to get more people to invest in stocks. Only a tiny fraction –two percent of India’s billion strong population – dabbles in the share market. Those in rural areas still prefer to invest in tangible assets like gold.

Even if Kannan is able to win back customers who’ve switched to the NSE, convincing newcomers to try their hand at trading shares, say observers, could be key to the BSE’s success. Given the robust year the Indian stock market has had, it could well attract a bunch of new investors.

Kannan has already started the process of repositioning the BSE. He’s in the process of buying a technology firm, has cut transaction fees, and – oh yes – he starts all his meetings on time.

MUMBAI, India (CNN) – Whenever my mother was unsure about what to gift someone for a birthday, wedding, anniversary or festival, my grandmother would say to her, “give gold.”

“It will last a life time and everyone appreciates it,” she would say.

Even today, my parents often gift gold on a special occasion. It’s part and parcel of Indian culture. Indians love wearing gold, giving gold, receiving gold.

Turns out we love hoarding it too. At least 20 to 25 thousand tons of gold is stored in households across India. With gold prices currently around $1005 an ounce that means around $807.7 billion is stashed away deep inside cupboards, under mattresses and at the back of safes in India.

India is the world’s largest consumer of gold and also a net importer of the precious metal. Problem is, once gold enters India, there is no transparent, standardized market for the resale of gold back into bullion. Gold sellers are at the mercy of middlemen: Anyone wanting to sell gold have to take a necklace or chain to a scrap jeweler. He would check it, weigh it and come up with a price for it. He’d charge a hefty commission, take it to a refinery and melt it.

Anjani Sinha is asking gold sellers to ignore the middlemen and follow him instead. He runs the National Spot Exchange – which has created the first transparent, standardized platform for gold trade in India.

Under this system, anyone with gold to sell can go directly to an approved refinery where gold is melted into bars or coins of an international standard. The seller can either take the bar home or leave it in a vault. He is given a receipt, which he can sell via an approved broker. The idea is to make trading in gold as easy as trading in stocks and shares.

If sellers start bringing some of their gold out from under mattresses and into the spot trading market, it has the potential to revolutionize the gold market – and make a massive impact on the Indian economy.

Si Kannan of Kotak Commodity Services walks us through some of the numbers: At current prices, even if 1% of India’s household gold enters the market, it would mean an extra $24 billion circulating through the domestic economy.

This would reduce India’s dependence on imports, pave the way for investment in domestic refineries, and increase employment opportunities.

The biggest challenge now though is convincing people to go to a refiner, not a scrap jeweler, when they want to sell gold. To be honest, I can’t see anyone from my grandmother’s generation going to a refiner instead of a family jeweler she has known for ages. Some habits are hard to break.

NEW DELHI, India (CNN) - For many Indians, a four-wheeled family car is the stuff of hopes and aspirations.

And Maruti Jayawant Bhandare – a 43-year-old man living on $160 a month by mending shoes from his tiny stall in Mumbai – learned earlier this week his dreams might have come true.

News reporters told him he was one of the lucky first 100,000 customers selected for the world's cheapest car, the Nano, being built by India's Tata Motors.

He was one of 206,703 people who in April booked what has been billed in India as “the common man's car.” He paid Rs 140,000, or around $2,800, for a deluxe version of the Nano; the basic model is priced from $2,000.

A cobbler booking a Nano made news in India, where a car ownership is a luxury for most. Here was a potential car owner who lives in a rented room in a Mumbai tenement with his wife and two school-age children.

I called him after seeing news reports he was among the first. Bhandare was eager to receive his tiny, jelly bean-shaped car – although he had yet to learn how to drive.

Still, he was a little unsure when his car would arrive since Bhandare doesn't know how to access the Internet to check the delivery information the company provided. So he gave me his details to check the company Web site for his application status.

Alas, I found the earlier press reports were incorrect – "Mr Maruti Bhandare" was not among the lucky first Nano owners. He is scheduled to take delivery of his car between January and March 2011.

A two-year wait for his sunshine-yellow hatchback sounded a bit too long for Bhandare. "I will go to the showroom, make some inquiries and decide then what's to be done now," he said.