SJMSOM, IIT Bombay celebrated their annual B school festival, Avenues 2012, from 2nd-4th Nov 2012. After last year's huge success, SJMSOM took the mega event to even greater heights with the theme "Surpassing Dreams, Unravelling Possibilities". CoolAge AOL was the title sponsor of Avenues 2012 and SBI was the assosciate sponsor. Other sponsors Spykar, Dominos, Gelato Italiano , Faaso’s etc made their presence felt in the event by setting up kiosks and leveraging on this opportunity of reaching the masses. Avenues provides students with the ideal opportunity to compete, excel and ultimately relax and soak in the calm and green atmosphere of IIT, Bombay.
The business festival was graced by the presence of stalwarts like Mr. and Mrs. Harsha Bhogle - Indian cricket commentator and journalist, Mr. Prabhu Chawla - Editorial Director of The New Indian Express Group, Mr. N. Santosh Hegde -Former justice of the Supreme Court of India, Ms. Shaheen Mistry- CEO of Teach for India in the distinguished lecture Series, of Avenues 2012 named Alankar. Avenues 2012 was inaugurated by the hands of Mr. Ajit Balakrishnan- Founder, Chairman and CEO- Rediff.com and D. Shivkumar- Director and Vice President, Sales at Nokia India.
There were a total of 9 flagship and domain events during Avenues 2012 apart from various On-the-Spot events. The flagship event Manthan was an attempt to simulate the 'G-20' summit in order to harness the power of ideas of the youth of this country to find solutions to some of the most pressing global problems of today. Another flagship event Mahayodha saw participants battling it out for 48 hours to win the title of the ultimate leader. Navonmesh – the b-plan contest directed to add significant skills to the budding entrepreneurs and kindle the spirit of entrepreneurship amongst them. Ashwamedh, a unique 2-day event involving strategy mash-up for varied problems, also garnered huge participation
Avenues also had domain events like Abhyutthan- the Marketing strategy event sponsored by Jet Airways, Moolyankan- an event for ‘Fin’-Wizards, Strategia- the consulting project, Leagile –Lean and Agile management game and the systems event named Prakalp. Apart from these, Avenues also had online events like Focus- the photography contest, Qwest- the online treasure hunt contest and On-the-spot events which ranged from Dumb charads to Poker (K)night.
After the intense competitive spirit of 3 days, it was time to relax. The festival ended on a high with the battle of bands and live performance of Mr. Ravi Iyer and friends at Pronite- the cultural extravaganza sponsored by F&D.
Avenues 2012 witnessed participation from around 4000 students across India with over 70 B-schools participating across 15 events for the prize money over Rs. 7 lakh. On the online publicity front it witnessed the highest weekly reach of 1.4 lakh and the Avenues page on Facebook had more than 1000 likes.
Several months of the hard work put in by the students finally culminated into reaching new heights and being one of the most successful B-school festivals in the history of SJMSOM, IIT Bombay. Avenues 2012 ended on a cheerful high promising to be back next year with a bang and taking this festival to new limits and exploring new horizons.