Cross Fire- The Fiery Inter-College Debate Competition
Date:               01/03/08
Venue:             IIPM, Chennai Campus          
Participants:    SRM College, Women’s Christian College, Loyola College & other colleges along with IIPM

Event description with details of the event:

HR Innovators in association with IIPM & NIPM organized an inter-college debate competition “Cross Fire” on the 1st of March 2008 at the IIPM – Chennai campus. The grand event was sponsored by Thomas International – a leading provider of management systems and business tools to various enterprises.

The event began with a magnificent inauguration by Mr. Ranjan Sen (Manager, Administration - IIPM) and Mr. Roy J George (VP, HR – isteel).The panel of judges consisted of Mr. Vamseedhar Soma (Senior Executive HR – Virtusa) and Mr. Sanjay K (Director - 365 Management Consultants).

The participants from various colleges across the city in the form of 13 teams were enthusiastic and made it tough for the judges to come to a conclusion on who would be the final winners. The event focused on debating contemporary HR issues like challenges from China; use and misuse of psychometric tools; and short term gains versus career growth.

Mr. Sai Prasad from SRM College and Ms. Kritika from Women’s Christian College bagged the first prize and got a cash award of Rs.10, 000. Mr. Prasanna and Mr. Patrick Veda from IIPM bagged the second prize and got a cash award of Rs.5,000. Ms.Varsha Lal Budhrani from IIPM and Mr. Vaidhya from Loyola College bagged the Best Speaker award for Female and Male categories respectively.

Prof. A. Anantharaman (Executive Committee NIPM) was the Chief Guest for the event. Mr. Ravindran (Executive Committee NIPM) and Mr. CV Gopinath (CEO – Simho HR Services) were the other Guests of Honour for the show.

The student coordinators were highly appreciative of the efforts of HR Innovators, yahoo group moderated from Chennai. Co-Founded and moderated by Mr. Roy.J. George, an IIM Calcutta Alumni, who has worked with Samtel and Sathyam Cinemas earlier and is currently the Vice President-HR at isteel, HR Innovators now has about 6300 members across the globe.

The coordinators themselves put in their level best to ensure that the event should reach the peaks of success. They didn’t mind skipping their meals and even staying in campus up to late hours, organizing the event. The coordinators consisted of students from Fall Winter PGP 07/09 & UGP 07/10 batches: Sudhansu, Karthik Umashankar, Jayraman, Brito, Sylvester, VetriSelvan, TamilSelvi, Suyambuvel, Arindham, Pavitra, Shashank, VijayRaghavan, Rizwan, Madhuri, Rehana, Aathif and Samanth.