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When intellectuals met

Last Updated 18 January 2010, 13:10 IST
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The dais looked like a firmament of stars, the ones of the brainy variety though. The launch of Captain Gopinath's autobiography Simply Fly had brought together the best brains as well as the most successful entrepreneurs. And befitting their stature, the guests debated, discussed and delved into some of the sensitive and not so sensitive aspects of the book, all the while making observations pertinent to our current context.

The usual P3Ps too were there, but could do nothing to render the occasion frivolous. And rightly it was time for some intellectual stimulation.

Chief of Mindtree Subroto Bagchi, the moderator for the evening and also a very dear friend of Gopinath, sought to make it a more interactive session. He engaged Chief mentor Infosys Technologies N R Narayana Murthy, IIM-B director Pankaj Chandra, Capt Gopinath and actress Suhasini Mani Ratnam — all accomplished men and women in their fields, in a lively debate.

The common thread that ran through the evening was that they were all first educated in their own respective mother tongues before they branched out to study in convent school and colleges. They all felt that the Captain's book was not about a single person's journey and success but offered a billion possibilities to the country as a whole. “The first thing that struck me when I read the book was that this was brilliant material for a movie. The book rightly captures the spirit of a country and its people,” said Suhasini.

Narayana Murthy observed that the book portrayed the changes that occur in every post colonial society, ‘the struggles of a developing nation have been brought well in the book,” he said. Pankaj Chandra, still wallowing in the success of ‘3 Idiots’, most of which was shot at the IIMB said that the book documented the journey of a young man from a small village to the global scene and that’s remarkable.  

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(Published 18 January 2010, 13:10 IST)

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