“In this world, aspirants may find enlightenment by two different paths. For the contemplative is the path of knowledge; for the active is the path of selfless action.” The Bhagavd Gita

Greetings of the festive season! Tamil Nadu and in particular Chennai is a riot of colours welcoming the monsoons and Deepavali. It is time for us at MMA to look back with pride and look forward with hope as rightly brought out in the quote above.

We had a flurry of activities during the months of September & October 2007 culminating in the record breaking 6th All India Management Students Convention. This year’s Students Convention broke many records. The largest number of student delegates. Over 1100. The largest number of participants from outside Tamil Nadu. We had students from Puduchery, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. The largest participation for the competitions. Over 150. The grand BoP debate introduced for the first time this year attracted very good participation. Overall the feedback was extremely gratifying.

Another programme of great significance held during the month of October was a talk by the Management Guru, Prof Jagdish N Sheth on “The Self-Destructive Habits of Good Companies – And How to Break Them”. This talk was a grand success and well received by our members. For the benefit of those members who could not attend the talk, MMA has arranged to place the powerpoint presentation in our website. I am quite sure that this information will be interesting and of immense value to our members.

Besides a number of one-day programmes which proved very popular, MMA have joined hands with the leaders in HR in India Ma Foi to offer a 10-week certificate programme in HRM scheduled to start on Nov 17th. The response to this programme has been overwhelming.

In our endeavour to promote high quality management education in this part of the country, two more student chapters of MMA were inaugurated - one at Jeppiaar Engineering College and the other at SSN College of Engineering. MMA plans to have many more student chapters this year.

As you are aware, MMA is constantly striving to increase the quality and quantity of the programmes being offered to its members. With this in view we are updating our databank of trainers and facilitators consisting of professional group of faculty to meet the ever increasing challenging requirements of corporates and individuals. In this direction, we have already initiated a number of measures to identify high quality resource persons. I take this opportunity to request our members to please recommend the names of the facilitators/trainers with their area of specialization whose services could be utilized by MMA.

MMA also gets requests frequently for guest lectures at various management colleges. We request senior management professionals to please volunteer for this noble task.

I am also very happy to inform the members that in our quest to “Go Beyond Chennai”, we are inaugurating one more Chapter (in addition to Salem) at Hosur by the Chief Guest,

Mr Bhaskar Bhat, Managing Director of Titan Industries Ltd on 16th November 2007 at 6.00 pm at Hotel Renaissance, Hosur. All members are cordially invited to join this happy occasion.

The Chairman, MMA Board for Communication has already initiated a number of measures to improve the quality and content of our website and Business Mandate. Last but not least we request you to contribute articles to Business Mandate. Help us make it more informative and interesting.
Wishing you all a Very Happy Deepavali!

Gp Capt R Vijayakumar, VSM.