In High Places

Second day of the Symposium dawned bright and clear.. no I'm not trying to sound like a book.. it *was* bright and clear, which was such a break from the bad weather the previous few days! A few of us (mostly Indians) had planned to reach the place early to register for Ratan Tata's leadership session that day.. I wasn't going t miss it for anything. We registered, had a leisurely breakfast (a croissant, cereal, yoghurt, fruits), and strolled in for Fujio Cho's speech - CEO of Toyota. He spoke in laboured english, I suppose he'd memorised the stuff, though he spoke with notes. The speech itself was nothing much. The q&a session that followed was cool. He answered in Japanese, and he had his own translator with him.. he cracked a couple of really funny jokes and answered very wittily. It was sort of unreal - all these big-name people talking and joking with us.. whew.

The chairman of British Airways was next, and that was an insightful talk.. I skipped the one after that because they were going to be talking about SARS, God knows we'd all heard enough of it! Then came the award ceremony for the student essay competition. The third prize winner's entry was ok, the first prize winner's was pure bilge. But the German female who won the second prize.. that was something! The essay was in German.. an immensely creative story about a Response called 'Essentials' (the theme of the Symposium, in case you've forgotten, was 'Seeking Responses in Times of Uncertainty'). She got the loudest and most prolonged applause.

After another awesome lunch (the chocolate mousse was there again!), Dr Helmut Panke, CEO of BMW, was billed to speak and we were definitely looking forward to that. And he *was* pretty good. Interesting speech about why not to diversify in the current environment.

But it was Ratan Tata's session we were most looking forward to that day, and it certainly lived up to its promise. Despite the fact that I was quite getting used to the feeling of meeting larger-than-life people during the symposium, this still gave me butterflies in the stomach. It was .. wow. You could tell the man didn't like making speeches. He just gave a short introduction and opened the floor to questions, and was clearly in his element as he handled the various kinds of queries that were shot at him - the unncessarily verbose and jargon-filled ones from the IIM people (man, they were snotty all through the Symposium!), the naive ones from the non-Indian corporate people who were attending, and the thoughtful ones from people like N.K. Singh and Chidambaram and me. Oh well, I guess it's painfully obvious I'm kidding. :)

After it was over, there was a special meet-the-big-guys session just for the Indian students with the Indian big-guys who were there. So off we went to another room, to talk to Chidambaram, N.K. Singh again, Sunil Bharti Mittal and Ratan Tata. It was so-so, owing mainly to the insistence of the IIM snots to corner the conversation with their "Oh, look, I can rattle off meaningless statistics faster than you can say 'shut up' " questions. (Boy am I going to get it if any of them chance by my website! ... people, I have temporarily been possessed by a demon who forces the plain truth out of me, it's not my fault!)

We rushed off to Chidambaram's special session, having missed the break because of the extra meeting, and that was also really good. Chidambaram is a fabulous speaker. The session was about bridging the gap between public opinion and politics and his speech was quite insightful. John Fund, an editor of the WSJ, was also there, and he was fab as well.. The group attending the session was also diverse ito nationalities and ethnicity (unlike the Ratan Tata one, which had been only sporadically sprinkled with firangs) so the atmosphere was far more relaxed and far less competitive (I'm tempted to ascribe this to the absence of some of the IIM guys but I guess I've gone far enough on that angle.. :D).

That evening was the International Buffet night. I'd taken along a white salwaar kameez especially for this, completely accessorised, bangles, bindis and all. The food was not exactly to my taste (though most people thought it was fantastic.. my limited choice is to blame, I suppose), but it was an awesome evening on the whole. Met Sergiy again, but mostly hung out with the Singapore bunch. We went shutter-happy all right, took dozens of snaps. Pity, only a few turned out well.

We went back really late that night.. 2 a.m or so.. and after that I stayed up really late reading.. till 4 or so.