Day 298 - 24th August 2011

The sports marketing sessions started at 1045 today. Today’s sessions were mainly about consumer behavior in sports marketing wherein we studied the different types of fans. Did get a little too heavy in the middle, but the prof had warned us well in advance that the first half of the day was going to deal with theory. Post lunch we had the first guest lecturer for the subject – Joy Bhattacharya, Team Director of the Kolkata Knight Riders. It was a brilliant 2 hour session with the first half on the business model of the IPL and the second on brand KKR. Invariably the discussion had to veer towards Sourav Ganguly and his exclusion from the team in the last season, it was a tough decision to take, he did admit that but it was taken from a long term perspective. Though he did acknowledge the fact that Ganguly is West Bengal or should I say Paschim Bongo’s favourite son. “Tagore, Satyajit Ray and now Ganguly, us bongs don’t have too much of a choice when it comes to our heroes” :D The best part about the discussion was that he patiently answered all sorts of questions ranging from the Fake IPL player to match fixing in the IPL. In a reply to one of the questions of player fatigue and the debacle in England he brought to our notice that India’s rise to the number one position began in 2008 and culminated in 2011 and the IPL was present in that very period, so it would be unfair to pin all the blame on the league. The best line of the lecture though had to be his opening line “Let’s make a deal, you don’t ask me about Shah Rukh’s sexual preferences and I wont bore you” :D

Played cricket in the evening in the Kachnar courtyard. Its always fun to play with a hard tennis ball on tiles, its akin to playing on Perth :P Played for a good hour at least. Post that there was a session on handwriting analysis conducted in the audi by a batchmate, which was pretty interesting. Have 3 birthday celebrations lined up tonight. Posting this one before they begin!