Corporate India lets hair down watching Mohali semifinal

Thursday, 31 March 2011, 07:00 IST
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New Delhi: For once they shed their board room mannerisms and dark suits to erupt in boisterous cheers when Sachin Tendulkar and Virendra Sehwag hit boundaries or when Zaheer Khan claimed the scalp of Kamran Akmal. These were the bigwigs of India Inc gathered at the Oberoi hotel here to watch the World Cup Cricket semifinal between arch rivals India and Pakistan on the big plasma television screens and video walls set up for this exciting match being played at Mohali in Punjab. The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) hosted the event. The assembled industrialists were passing comments and giving their expert sound bytes -- but this time not on the budget proposals, or the credit policy of the central bank, but on the way Team India was performing at Mohali. The gathering included Hari Bhartia, Brij Mohan Munjal, Malvinder Mohan Singh, Rajan Bharti Mittal, Ajay Shriram, Vijay Thadani, Arun Bharat Ram, Vikram Bakshi, Siddharth Shriram and Chandrajit Banerjee. "The ambience is almost perfect, with tricolours on every table... While watching a match on the field is way different from such a gathering, but events like this have their own advantage and fun... where you can actually follow every movement very precisely," Hari Bhartia, president, CII told IANS. Bhartia's enthusiastic comments came just after Yuvraj Singh got the wicket of Yuonis Khan, by getting through to his stumps. Similar sentiments were shared by Chandrajit Banerjee, director general of CII, who said: "There is a lot of high spirits and fun that can been seen here as the match progresses. After all, this is an India-Pakistan match." Meanwhile, others in the gathering like Vinayak Chatterjee, chairman, Feedback Ventures Pvt. Ltd said that winning or losing a match was part and parcel of the game and the most important thing was a good match of cricket being played. "To my mind winning the game is not that important, what is important is that we are having a great game, and that there is so much of maturity between India and Pakistan and the ever increasing good relations," Chatterjee said. While several guests at the do wore the Team India uniform, the settings and the decor were also also all about cricket -- cricket nets, bats, balls and pads at vantage points, tables decorated with the tricolour and some old-fashioned glasses with four-five cricket balls in them.
Source: IANS