The weekend was a busy one. Saturday was spent in this convention, while Sunday was spent loitering in a mall meeting fellow blogmates.

Speaking about the convention, I think it is one of the best event organized for Malaysian Indian youth in this year. It was well-organized despite the fact that this is a maiden convention of this sort. This post will be a small re-cap of National Indian Youth Convention (NIYC 2007), just to highlight it to those who have missed it. And no, this is not a paid posting.

It started a little late than what is scheduled - that was a minor setback though I must stress that it was all worth the wait. After opening speech by the President of TheMind (the organization which organized NIYC 2007), the convention was then officially launched by Prof Dr Bala Shanmugam.

One thing that pulled me to register for the event will be their list of amazing personalities. Some were unknown to me, but boast a credible CV! The keynote address for example, was given by Tan Sri Dato's Professor Emeritus Dr Gajaraj Dhanarajan, the VC of Wawasan Open University. This soft spoken speaker brought us back to world war era when he spoke about his history and right up to current technological advancement, where he emphasized us not to confine ourselves to the borders of Malaysia.

We had three more talks in line after that. The first talk was given by Major General (R) Dato' Pahlawan Dr Mohanadas Ramasamy, who spoke about challenges of succeeding in the government services. I don't think many of M'sian Indian youths are interested to even join the civil service, let alone to be successful in it. Good to see that there are some people from our community made it huge in the sector we all tend to avoid.



The next speaker was the highlight of the whole convention. Most of us waited since morning only to listen to his talk. Not to undermine the other speakers, but I must say this Datuk will outshine anyone excerpt may be Tan Sri Ananda Krishnan). He was none other than Datuk Vinod Sekhar, the second richest Indian in Malaysia. It was a fun-filled talk, and the fact that his business idea started with just USD50 amazed a lot of people. We had flood of questions from the floor for which he patiently answered. I couldn't agree more when he said this country a wonderful place and worth fighting for :)

The third talk was given again by Prof Bala Shanmugam. One thing that I like to listen will be successful personalities' life story, and Prof Bala is a master in it! Didn't know he is actually with Monash University, where I am working for a year now! That's a shame.. *sigh. He ended the talk with an interesting quote which I saw many of the participants taking down: "Aspire to Inspire before you Expire".



If there is something I was unhappy with the convention, that would be the forum. Not because it was not good, because I feel the forum panellists where not well-utilised. Probably the organizers were running out of time as it was already towards the end of the convention, but I feel the forum should have more substance in it as I know it is not easy to gather such a prominent panel. We had Prof Emeritus Dr Singaravelu (University Malaya), Assoc Prof Dr Sureswaran (Mlabs System), Datuk Suret Singh (Ministry of Transport) and Mr Uthaya Sankar (RTM) in the panel while Prof Dr Subramaniam (University Malaya) moderated the forum. May be if the forum was given a specific theme and all discussion pointed towards the theme/title, it would have been more effective.



Overall, despite the minor short coming, I would say the convention was a successful one. As I said before, it is one of the best event for the year and should be held annually. For the organizing committee, I would like to thank them and wish them all the best!