Talking and Cruising
The first day of the Symposium was a mixed experience. Most of the talks and sessions were really boring that day, but on the other hand, it was my first taste of the stunning level of efficiency and organisation apparent in the organising team. Their attention to every detail, their general helpfulness, cheerfulness and their arrangements were all superlative, and I spent the day marvelling at it all.
When we went into the main convention hall we were given earphones to hear the translations of speeches that wouldn't be in our language: these guys had a bunch of full time professional translators sitting there translating every keynote session into German, French and English.
After the opening ceremony, Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach (vice chairman of Goldman Sachs), who was to be the chairman for the first half of the symposium, gave a short, fun introduction. Two very longwinded and boring speeches followed, one by the head of the Department of Justice in Switzerland, one by the Labour and Economic Affairs Minister in Austria. We were all yawning and trying to come to terms with what looked set to be our fate for the next two and a half days when N.K. Singh, member of the Planning Commission of India, came on, and delivered a fantastic speech on India's growth in the recent years. He didn't use a shred of notes, and hardly used up two thirds of his allotted twenty minutes. And he was interesting.
The import of his speech had been about making India into a knowledge economy, in the question and answer session I asked him why India needed to be one, when its manufacturing sectors could be at least as profitable if focused on. My moment of glory. :) He said the two weren't mutually exclusive, given the diversity of social classes in India, and I sort of agree I suppose. There's room for pretty much anything if you have a billion people spread out across a huge economic spectrum.
The rest of the keynote sessions were a bust, with one notable exception: Christopher Meyer, vice president of Ernst and Young gave a superb presentation on current technologies and business opportunities. As Lord Griffiths remarked, our brains were left breathless by the time he was done.
We had a superb lunch of salad, pasta, soup with more of that superb multi-grain bread and sticky rice with sinfully titillating chocolate mousse, custard and fruit salad for dessert. It was raining off and on that day, which made it freezing cold as well.. I was shivering most of the time, even with three layers on.
I'd registered for a leadership session titled "Sustainability Ventures: Reviving the entrepreneurial spirit", and it was so boring I was tearing my hair out. Later on, the special session entitled "Restoring confidence in capital markets", by Stephen K. Green of HSBC bank was only marginally better, but this time it was because most of the stuff they were talking about when right over my head.. wouldn't have grazed my hair even if I'd had a Marge Simpson hairdo. At that point I'd resolved to read up on econs and all, but that hasn't materialised into action yet.. I still have good intentions tho.
The evening event sounded like fun: a cruise on Lake Constance (or Bodensee, as it's locally known), and dinner on board the cruise boat. Awesome, right? The sad thing was, it was raining a lot which seemed to preclude opportunities to wander out on the deck.. but heck. On the way there by bus, I was talking to an investment banker from Geneve, who was very interested that India had registered a growth of 6% on average even over the past three years (N. K. Singh seemed to have made a universal impact). I was only too happy totalk to him about India. Sadly enough, it was raining when we got off the bus and walked tot he boat. Once there, I ran into a few student aquaintances from Ukraine, Sergiy, Svyatoslav and a Russian guy whose name I forget. That Russian guy was something else - very avante-garde, doing a PhD in finance at the ripe old age of 22, and incredibly pissed off that he hadn't won the essay competition. As in, he wanted first place. Apparently, his entry was a 2000-word poem, free verse, I suppose. He's vowed to do it next year. Phew.
I joined these three people for dinner, which was excellent - salad, kartofl eintopf (a potato pie) as main course (it was sooooper!), and ice cream with exotic fruit sauce for dessert. For the first time in my life I *loved* the ice cream.. I wish I knew what flavour it was! The wind was howling outside, the company was great.. we caught glimpses of the Austrian, Lichtenstein-ian and German coastlines during the cruise, wandered out on the deck even though I ended up with numb fingers.. definitely, 'a jolly good time was had by all.'
