Avenues 2009 held at SJSOM

Avenues 2009, the annual two-day business festival of the Shailesh J Mehta, School of Management, IIT Bombay, based on the theme 'People, planet and profit' reflected the creative and intellectual spirit of the management students.

It was a great experience for the management students to organise the events, get sponsors and run the show smoothly and live up to the expectations of the participants.

"As management students, we are masters at case studies. But, the practical aspect is never checked. Organising events of such scale helps us put these principles in practice. It gives us a test field to implement our ideas and check what works and more importantly, why it works, like marketing the event on social networking sites," says Amey Kambli, second year student at SJMSOM IIT Bombay, event coordinator of Avenues 2009.

Successful entrepreneurs and outstanding achievers from different walks of life participated in the event.

M.Damodaran, former SEBI chief; Ajit Balakrishnan, founder and CEO of rediff.com; Pramod Chaudhari, chairman, Praj Industries; Ness Wadia, joint managing director, Wadia Group; Rahul Bose, actor, and Prahlad Kakkar, advertising guru addressed the students during the event.

The event also saw participation from students of more than 150 B-schools across India as well as leading corporate houses and working professionals.

Starting off the guest lecture series called Alankar, Ajit Balakrishnan, founder and CEO, rediff.com, delivered a thought-provoking speech. He talked about the digital revolution, the threats and opportunities for India. "India will lose its way in the online digital revolution just like it did during the industrial revolution if the government does not take proactive measures to make broadband cheaper and easily accessible," he said.

Avenues 2009 saw active participation from B-school students on various events like: a HR event, green project financing, Pune infrastructure consulting challenge, social marketing event and such other novel concepts.

"These ideas were well-received by the B-school community and we got over-whelming participation. An innovative concept of collaborative green IT strategy was slightly ahead of time. The event execution was smooth with the support from public relations and logistics teams," Amey said.

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