Wednesday September 10, New Dehli

Wednesday was a crazy day.  I woke up at 5:30am and headed to the gym.  This was a big accomplishment since I had been so sick the last few days!  Then I headed up to the club for breakfast (this was a pretty cool option as eating at the restaurant downstairs meant that anyone could sit down at my table...) to meet Duncan and I thought the Government Relations guys for breakfast.  But they didn't show...so instead I enjoyed the last moment of solitude until I went to bed.   Then I had 2 back to back meetings with NSA (one with a larger group of other vendors, then just Oracle).  By 9:30am I had to meet my moderator and prepare for my 10am panel.  We met in the VIP room and it was oppressively hot.  The reason is the “VIP Room” was actually a partitioned area placed next to large plate glass windows.  The result?  It was a sauna in the room.   I suggested that it was oppressively hot and could we go somewhere else?   So we went downstairs to one of the track rooms.   Surprisingly the prep went well; and I took just a few notes about what I would say to certain questions.  After only about 25 minutes we headed up to the Main plenary room.   I sat down next to the moderator.   The time flew by and I got a couple of good responses that I got complimented later on from the audience.  Here’s a shot of me on the panel that came out ok: 

My Panel

The rest of the day was  I was in intense meeting after meeting.   By mid-afternoon, I started to feel some allergy symptoms coming on…so I went back to my room to take a short break.  That seemed to help as I had 3 more hours of meetings that lasted right up to the cultural presentation at 7pm. 

I changed (we were getting one certificate) and headed down for what turned out to be a pretty good dance recital, spanning the variety of dances in India.   There was one audience participation dance that seemed to have some parallelism to the Hava Nigila Jewish dance. 

Indian Dancing

There was also a dance for the monsoon (which apparently worked).  Some of the dignitaries took part and that was pretty funny.    There was no “Gala” to the dinner, just another Indian buffet, but at least they had a Pasta bar so I had that….still being careful about my stomach.   I had a few laughs with some friends,  and at some point there was talk about going to the club in the hotel “Kitty Sue.”  But by 10:30pm I was so exhausted that I went up and crashed.