Arastan at Mumbai Christmas Fest

I love Mumbai. Hot, dirty, far too many people but home and so efficient. We managed to pack a lot in: the Indo-German Christmas Fest that was exhausting with the 12 hours of standing each day but taught us lots about the Mumbai market, tracking down a ceramist that does interesting wall art, a meeting with our financial and tax advisors, a trip to the ‘you get everything you can possibly imagine and those bits you cannot’ Santa Cruz market and, of course, food! The old man on Pali Hill (he must be in his 70s now) still makes the best sev puri. Not so impressed by a rather more expensive Trishna.

We saw our financial advisors after the fair for a planning exercise. Vaibhav Manek is a partner in a firm called KNAV and does customer relationships like no other. If he wasn’t so good at what he does, I would say he is in the wrong profession! It also usually takes Mike and me a good day before we absorb all that Vaibhav has said and I would say we are fairly intelligent people!

Came back with rattling bones but decided to do the Sunday Soul Sante the following weekend. I wonder about myself sometimes. Good fun and a great way to get known. And off I was three days later to the TiE Entrepreneurial Summit. Wow! Some excellent speakers such as Infosys co-founder NS Raghavan on behavioural economics, Jack Rivkin on the global economy and investment climate, Scott Cook (founder of Intuit Inc.) on leadership in the agile age. But the most striking aspect was the number of young entrepreneurs in the IT and clean technology space. Great intellectual stimulus, inspiring and very good to know that we have done much right in the way we have gone about Arastan. It is incredibly easy to be hard on oneself!