Media Conclave

Under the twilight of the evening skies, in the open air theater of IIM Bangalore we witnessed a meeting of the minds, a coming together of ideas to define an interesting topic - The New Indian. Big names like Mani Shankar Aiyer, Manish Sabharwal, R K Mishra and Krish Ashok explored various avenues of attributes that shapes us in the new generation in a discussion moderated by Sidin Vadukut. 

It was a joy to lounge back on the grass and listen to the flow of thoughts interspersed with a sense of humour that had the audience gripped.. In between bouts of laughter to the comments, the discussion saw issues like poverty, education, labour market, technology which prompted the students to think and ponder for themselves.. In a subtle and engrossing mix of humour and seriousness, the panel explored questions of patriotism, answering the doubt of a question poised by the audience and tried to put a definition and an understanding of patriotism..They also went on to discuss about how the world outside sees us and what is the image if India and the image of Indian outside India.. Then the conversation turned towards the idols and heroes of the modern Indian.. While some were of the opinion that the current heroes were flippant and that older generation idols had more integrity, there was some dissent to that opinion also. 

All this led to them deciding on whether there has been any change in the definition of Indian and comparing between the old Indian and the new Indian.. While Mr. Aiyer thought there was no change in the Indian, R K Mishra opined that the new Indian is more bold, confident but is also the one who prefers to argue in the dining room rather than coming to the pollbooth.. Mr. Sabharwal was of the opinion that the new Indian is luckier than the old Indian with many more opportunities.. And Mr. Krish Ashok defined the New Indian as doing jalsa, shopping for Windows, more tech savvy, better informed, and occasionally mis-informed.

Even with such varied definitions one came out of the discussion, inspired to think more about where the country is going and where is the place of the New Indian in the world. In the context of people saying that the next decade will be the greatest for India, we hope he emerges on the world stage and retains his image to portray both the advancement and the heritage of the country..

Bizarre - the Open Quiz

Vista concluded this evening with Bizarre, the traditional Business Quiz, conducted by none other than Mr. Derek O'Brien and his company. 

A prelim round in the afternoon was followed by a face to face with 6 teams on stage in the breezy Open Air Theater. And two teams had an IIMB flavor too - including one with Prof. Rajeev Gowda! With his trademark wittiness, Derek certainly made the quiz a lot of fun to attend - as could be seen from the size of the audience. From "What is the largest solar harvesting industry" (agriculture) to "which is the most expensive spice after saffron" (vanilla), the questions were reasonably tough but just workable enough for the audience to be actively discussing the answers amongst themselves...

People from a host of companies like GE, Sun, KPMG, TCS, Yahoo!, Oracle etc. took part (the prelims had over 100 teams taking part). But in the end, the victors were fairly seasoned Bangalore quizzers - a team comprising people from Accenture, Sun and Kotak. And hey - the team from IIMB with Prof. Gowda in it came a close second, much to the joy of his students!

All-in-all a high voltage and exciting event - that saw relaxed FII (Forum for Industrial Interaction at IIMB - the organizers of Vista) members sitting down and having fun - after days!

Sidin Vadukut's Book Reading

Today, on the final day of Vista 2010, lit-geeks and humour-freaks assembled for Sidin Vadukut' book reading session, in front of the IIMB mess.


For those not in the knowing, Sidin Vadukut is one of India's top bloggers and the managing editor of Mint. Sidin did his schooling in Abu Dhabi, then obtained a degree in engineering from NIT Trichy. He did his post-graduation in IIMA, received an offer from a day-zero consulting firm, which he ditched for a career in journalism. Sidin also writes a popular blog at www.whatay.com. It's a hilarious blog with a huge following. Also, quite recently, Sidin wrote his first book, Dork : The amazing adventures of Robin Einstein Varghese.


And with his self-deprecating brand of humour, make us laugh he did. A style that is difficult to replicate here and which won't even sound good, so I'm not trying! But in short he answered several questions that the host (Shri Praveen Gopalkrishnan of the IIMB Media Cell) posed - including the monetary difficulties in his 'chosen path' (reaching the top of Maslow's Pyramid ... now isn't that something all we MBAs want?), what he feels about his own book etc. etc. 


And in the end, Sidin read out some bits from his novel... and yes we can vouch that this will be a good buy :)
Sidin Vadukut will be speaking at the Media Conclave in the Open Air Theater at 5:00 p.m. today... be there!

A Helping Hand ...

They don't need our pity, neither our sympathy. They seek a life of dignity and self-dependence and they seek our help towards achieving it. That was the essence of Sparsh- the social responsibility event in which participants were asked to solve cases based on the problems faced by the NGOs - Samarthanam and Seva In Action. These NGOs aim to make the physically disabled employable. The event involved the finalists visiting these NGOs in Day0 and getting to know their operating model and existing facilities. Thereafter, they had to come up with plans to improve the returns on existing infrastructure and think of future areas of growth within the budget constraint of the NGOs.

The finalist team did their ground work well and impressed the jury with innovative and well-thought ideas. The team from TAPMI (Beacon) and the team from IIM Bangalore (Utkarsh) were adjudged for the best idea for case Samarthanam and Seva In Action, respectively.

Business is in the air !

Business is in the air ! It is time for the final leap. No doubt the competition is cut-throat.

At Street Smart - the merger and acquisition competition, six teams - three on buy-side and three on sell-side presented their pitch. The case from education sector was very contemporary and called for considerable in-depth industry and market research. The event was spread over three rounds (including the prelims) with multiple rounds of negotiations during which the teams re-formulated and re-negotiated their strategies. When the teams discussed the minutest details of pricing the deal by factoring in every recent event from recession to jump-effect - you knew they meant business! At the end of it, Nishant and Priyank (buy-side) and Ankit and Arunava (sell-side), both the teams from IIM Bangalore, emerged as the smartest on the street and walked away with the prizes.

But the market champs ain't no less. In tune with the contemporary price wars in the telecom sector of India, the event SCAN involved designing a market research and coming up with a market entry strategy for a new entrant in the sector. The finalist teams did the work with a panache as they outlined the strategy for customer targeting, pricing, advertisement and promotion and roll-out. The crtical questions from the judges required the teams to think on their feet. The teams from MDI and IIFT walked down the winning carpet !

The invasion of Greeks

One of the earliest events in the day was the strategy case presentation of the tully breweries. The participants seemed unusually excited about the case and we understood the reason when they started presenting their analysis of the beer markets' segmentation, targeting and positioning. One could see their joy at getting to do a case study on a subject so close to their heart. 

But the judges were no fools.. They ripped into the teams and tore through their analysis with critical and insightful comments and the participants were forced to think fast and back up their thought processes by providing sound reasoning and logical opinions.. The Greeks might have needed a Trojan horse to get into the city.. But these students just used their intelligence, their management fundae taught by their classes and excel and powerpoint to get into the heart of the problem and destroy it from within.. 

A special mention of the participants from SIBM of Pune and of IIM Shillong to compete in the event.. Kudos to you guys.. Keep it up..  

Brain teasers !!

The smartest corporate brains battled it out for their honour. With brain-teasers that leave you gaping, this was not a quiz you could just walk away with. With questions ranging from the story behind the logo of Congress to the battle between brands in Silicon Valley, the quiz was an ultimate challenger. The quiz witnessed participation from corporates like Yahoo, KPMG, Vertebrand, TCS, FICO, Sun Microsystems, to name a few.

Top six teams were selected after a prelim written round to battle it out in the finals hosted by quiz-master Mitesh Agarwal. Mitesh sprinkled the quiz with humour, wit and brains. The questions ranged from the domains of car, telco, superstition, music, diet food, fashion retail and silicon valley - and tested the depth and breadth of one's knowledge. Goodies like bags, t-shirts and gift vouchers kept the audience involved throughout the quiz.