Interesting weekend .. but tough week ahead...

This weekend went quite well. I stayed mostly away from the books except spending some time today evening ( rather yesterday evening) on two assigments that have to be submitted by 8am tmorrow morning.

The weekend went very interesting with two key highlights - WTO workshop and talk by Mahesh Murthy of Pinstorm.

The WTO workshop was taken by Shishir Priyardarshi, a WTO official and former Indian diplomat. He shared some very good insight and experiences. Experiences which are hard to know by reading any book. Some of the interesting things that came up besides the conventional topics were consensus based decision making process at WTO ( each member country having equal vote unlike any other international organization; thus US equaling Sudan) , green room meeting concepts, special duty and quota free rights to LDCs (on 97% products, the remaining 3% products being the ones in which these countries trade mostly- so a mockery!!). Usual stuff which was covered was dispute settlement process, multi-fiber agreement, most favored nation clause, anti-dumping rules etc. The session ended with the career opportunities in WTO. This topic came up on request of a fellow student.

Another event about which I heard a lot was speaker series session by Mahesh Murthy, founder and CEO of Pinstorm, a search engine marketing specialist company. I couldn't attend it because of WTO workshop being in the same slot. I tried to gather about it from my friends. They told the guy was very unconventional and had a tangential line of thought. He criticzes Kotler, believes MBA education and any such education conditions one's mind and make one just an employee and not a employer. In response to one of the question asked by ~P about what 3 things he will suggest ISB students to do now, he responded saying that damage has already been done and only 3 things can be done now - Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll.

Want to write more.. but got to sleep.. Cya!!