Avenues Opening Ceremony with Rajit Kapur

Lighting the Lamp with Dean(SA) Prof U A Yajnik, Mr. Rajit Kapur & HOD Prof G K Adil

AVENUES 2013 kicked off today with a lot of enthusiasm from SJMSOM IIT Bombay along with the other departments of IITB. The flagship event was ALANKAR, the distinguished leadership lecture series and that marked a fitting start to the awesome Business festival of SJMSOM, IIT Bombay. ALANKAR was divided into 3 lectures, one in the morning as inauguration of AVENUES and the second and third in the afternoon.

The first speaker for the day was Mr. Rajit Kapoor, a very famous actor well known for his excellent depiction of Detective Byomkesh Bakshi and many other movies and theatre plays. With the audience smartly dressed in suits and the Avenues shirts, the ground looked set for a shot of motivation. Mr. Rajit Kapur spoke on a very important topic useful for our generation i. e success, failure and energy management. He started by stating that strangely, he was always associated with IIT. He then said that success is upon us to determine. Success is subjective and everyone has to define their own success. A very simple and beautiful concept given was that success is when you really are able to answer to yourself without any conscience. He then quoted a brilliant line from a book by Dr. A.P.J Abdul Kalam that

“Dreams are not what you see when you sleep, but those who don’t let you sleep”

He emphasized passionately the need of managing our energy. He said that we utilize only 10% of our energy. Adding to that, he said that we should not kill the child within us as that is a very important source of enthusiasm and energy for us. He then went over to say that each person is unique and has his/her own set of strengths. Every adversity brings out these inner strengths and in the face of an adversity, one gets a very good chance to introspect and get to know the real person inside. He wished us a lot of struggle so that we, the future of the country can really introspect, bring out our inner strengths and be the people which can ramp India up.

Then, he moved on to discuss his journey of life from his boards to B.Com, M.A Psychology to helping his father with business, taking over the business and running it for 25 years to maintaining his love for theatre simultaneously and later his stint in TV production and movies. I think he is one of the greatest example of multi-tasking as he maintained a passion for acting even when he was running his father’s company for 25 years. He learnt dealing with change, having time for yourself to introspect, trust and sensitivity during that stint. He then recalled an incident which was a crisis that when his first show of the theatre was going to be held, the December Bombay riots took place. He had an option to scrap it and give up but he took the second option to postpone it and made sure that it was done. By this, he told that even in crisis situations, we should remain calm and fight back to the situation.

Lastly, he spoke about acting that acting is a graphing technique. You have to map out your character in various situations. Rehearsal is just experimentation with the characters. He spoke about Mr. Shyam Benegal, how he learnt humility and hardwork from him and how he is a part of every project of Shyam Benegal. Then after a set of brilliant questions asked by the already mesmerized audience, the talk was concluded on two major points; one was that you have to figure out what you want to do and map out the path for the same without pressing any panic buttons. The other point was that it is very important to keep every gap, every door open as you never know what energy and spark you can receive from any of the doors.

Overall, it was a brilliant talk and thanks to the smooth organizing of the event, everything went on smoothly and the audience enjoyed every single moment of the first talk of ALANKAR. Really, it was a fitting start to one the of most energetic B-school fests in the country.

Chinmay Kothekar

Master of Management

Shailesh J Mehta School of Management, IIT Bombay