Divvy Kant Upadhyay, Manipal

Mangalore, Sep 5: There are perhaps three ways to look at Money – Economical value, Ethical value and Emotional value. This food for thought was provided by Registrar (Intl Progs) and Director Planning at Manipal University, Dr H Vinod Bhat in his presidential address at the Fin-Fest 09 – A Finance Fest organized by FINNACLE – an association of students of the Faculty of Finance at Manipal Institute of Management, Manipal.

Citing lessons learnt from recent economic dabbles, he opined that the ethical touch to earning money gets left out of the loop too often resulting in trouble. “Differentiate between need and greed – afterall, the way towards the goal, is as important as the goal itself” said Dr Vinod Bhat hinting at unethical business practices that led to the recent global economic meltdown. “It was the ‘dot-com’ debacle once, the ‘Sub-Prime mess’ this time and there are all chances it will be something else the next time” said Dr Bhat, stressing that ‘greed overtaking need’ has always been the root-cause of historical economic blunders.

Encouraging the students to opt for healthy and legitimate methods of making money for themselves, companies stakeholders, Dr Bhat narrated personal experiences in fund raising and healthcare management at a rural centre in Karkala. A Professor of Community Medicine, Dr Vinod Bhat transformed a two-room primary healthcare clinic to the full fledged Dr TMA Pai Rotary Hospital in Karkala by raising funds from philanthropists and international agencies.

Speaking at the inauguration, GM Finance at MRPL, R Subramaniam gave an overview of the Sub Prime crisis and the cascading or domino – effect it had across the world. This set the stage for the day long Workshop on the Impact of Global Meltdown. Several academic games have been planned for the Fest, which has participants from over 20 Business Schools in Karnataka. In his message to the students, MIM Director, Dr KVM Varambally encouraged students to think out-of-the-box and be prepared to read the writing on the wall, rather than be post-mortem analysts. Faculty Incharge Sandeep Shenoy and Student Representatives Akeel Shetty and Jennifer lead the organization of the two day Fest.