Day 3 - Stat Attack!

We're all REALLY IMPRESSED with the quality of meetings that have been set up for us. Today's meetings just kept the bar right up there with the action packed Day 2. Our first meeting was at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (some call it the Harvard of India) with Dr. Charan Singh. It's a beautiful campus as you can see from some of the photos below.

We were given a presentation on financial inclusion which had a lot of numbers in it (hence the title of today's post!), but numbers by themselves can be meaningless and confusing if not contextualized. Dr. Singh's presentation was a great blend of slides and interactive discussions which kept the yawning to a minimum! What made the presentation even more interesting was the compelling storytelling ability of Dr. Singh which really engaged all in attendance giving us a bird's eye view into why India is so unique.







The travelling was a little hectic today, taking an hour to reach from IIM to the World Trade Center (yup... WTC in Bangalore, it's a chain of buildings and not just the one in NYC. Look up World Trade Centers Association on your search engine). Here are some of the sights from pictures taken during the journey!

Kids playing cricket and all sorts of sports













Local stalls on the road. Love the way they've dressed up the walls!

Next on to meeting with the Canadian Trade Commissioner services where we were given a very good briefing of what services the trade commission offers and a bunch of stats on some macroeconomic indicators in India (from left to right: Kyle Nunas and Deepak Murthy). It's also awesome to meet UVic alums and we had Daniel McCombe who took the MGB course previously and now working at Airbus in Bangalore join us. He's pictured below on the extreme left

That was it for meetings today! Some of us went out for Chinese food (sorry for ditching you guys! I was just really really tired) and now I think these two have the right idea...