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Celebrities Steal the Show at NASSCOM ILF 2012

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DQI Bureau
New Update

For the people in Indian IT industry, the mood at Nasscom's India Leadership Forum (NILF) in February each year is the most accurate barometer of the state of the IT business-more so the offshoring business. For those already in the industry, it is a platform where they validate if their mood is actually the mood prevailing in the industry; for outsiders, it gives an idea of where the industry is in, in terms of sentiments.

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The NILF 2012 was business as usual. The mood was surely not upbeat. Neither was it too gloomy, as it was in, say, 2009. Interestingly, something for which NILF has been known, was even more evident this time. That is while the registration was good, and there was good crowd in the conference area of Grand Hyatt, the hall (this time, there was just one main session for most part of the program) was half empty in most sessions.

The sessions that got the most crowd were those of the celebrities-Richard Hadlee on the first day, Shekhar Kapoor on the second day, and Abhishek Bachchan on the third. While this writer could not attend the last one, the other two were surely impressive-not just by the audience size but also by the content.

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Sir Richard Hadlee, one of the greatest allrounders the game has produced, impressed with his wit while doing a thorough job of selling New Zealand. He actually generously sprinkled cricketing examples and anecdotes to make his point. Australia chose its team of 11 from a population of 23 mn, India does that from a population of 1 bn, while New Zealand does that from a population of 4 mn, adding that the world can learn a thing or two from how to score with limited resources. He also referred to the 1992 World Cup where New Zealand stunned the world by opening the bowling with a spinner-Deepak Patel of Indian origin. That was disruptive thinking. New Zealand had topped the table with seven straight wins in that World Cup.

Hadlee also made the entire audience play a game related to cricket while gave away a prize to the winner. While answering a prize-winning question-what should IT learn from cricket and what should cricket learn from IT-he elaborated on the need for sports technologies.

Shekhar Kapoor who tried to initiate a debate on-if social media could challenge the idea of nation-states-said that social media is reassessing the role of the gatekeeper and has handed the power back to the community. He upheld the value of shared ideas as he said no creative person gets the ideas just from inside his brain but by observing and learning from people. So, a crowd-creative act is better than an individual creative act, he concluded. He also received some of the most stirring questions.

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