Day 2: Mumbai

Day two in Mumbai. First things first, personal announcements. It's Salim's birthday! Hooray! Happy birthday, Salim! We love you, dude...

Salim: 33 years young today

The theme for the day was multinational corporations and finance. We had three meetings. The first was with a large conglomerate called Aditya Birla Group with diverse operations in manufacturing, energy and financial services. Two things were interesting about this company. One, the founder of the firm was a close personal friend of Mahatma Gandhi and has carried forward many of the Mahatma's teachings in the companies values. Two, the company seemed to defy conventional business wisdom (at least what we were taught in winter quarter strategy last year) that value can be added through the combination of multiple business units.

All of us with Aditya Birla Group

The second meeting was with Chandha Kochhar of ICICI Bank. We loved this woman. She was incredibly bright and articulate and gave some of the most interesting answers to our questions about trends in the Indian economy. The take away for us was the phenomenal trends in demographics taking place in India right now; it is the youngest country in the world and over the next twenty years is going to see a staggering growth in its middle class.

Finally, we met with Private Equity firm Warburg Pincus. We met a Principal and an Associate - both very impressive. For the non-finance dummies in the group, the meeting was hard work in places but I think we all left with a much better understanding of the booming private equity industry in India.

Jose: shamelessly exploiting the cheap labor in India

Having finished all the hardcore meetings, we had the rest of the day to relax and have fun. This started with a lot of drinking on the bus (swigging shots of Smirnoff from the bottle) and continued at the restaurant drinking many, many bottles of Kingfisher beer. We started Salim on a course of 33 shots of beer to celebrate his birthday, unfortunately we ran out of steam after about only six shots! The girls of the group painted their hands with mendhi while many others got their palms read. Unfortunately we are not sure the palm reader guy was for real. He seemed to have two standard predictions: all the women will get married, have kids and be successful; all the men will get married, have kids, be successful - and keep a mistress! He knows us so well ;-)

Women: love, family and success predicted by palm reader

Men: will take mistresses according to palm reader

The rest of the night / early morning is a blur to most of us as we write the blog. We went clubbing to probably the most crowded and loud club EVER. For the boring old guys (like yours truly) it proved too much to handle beyond 2am. But the younger kids in the group (Powers, Mittal, Dr Mo) had legs for another three hours of dancing, drinking and lady charming ;-)

Partying in Mumbai