Two exciting days of India’s best b-school students pitted against each other yielded IIM Bangalore as the winner in both the Debate as well as Quiz events of Business Today Acumen 2006 South Zone.

Venkatraghavan and Gautham Krishnan, both IIM Bangalore students took away the South Zone Debate title by speaking for the motion ‘Big companies are not agile and adaptable’. Runners up TAPMI, who had reached the finals after defeating IIM Kozhikode put up a formidable show speaking against the motion. The IIM-B team shall face IIFT-Delhi and two other teams at the Acumen national finals in Mumbai, come November.

Venkataraghavan, a PGP-II student at IIM-B, did his BE in Computer Science from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, following which he worked at Motorola, Singapore for 2.5 years. A debater since school days, he won the national debating championships in Singapore, following which he represented his University in the international debating circuit. “This was quite an enriching experience for me because I got to closely interact with other university students from all over Asia and the Australian continents,” he says. He was part of the team that was ranked ninth among 70 teams in the Australasian Inter-varsity Debating Championships at the University of Melbourne and the All Asian Debating Championships at Mahidol University, Bangkok, Thailand. “I had been cut off from debating ever since I left NTU, but Acumen has brought back all those fond memories,” he says.

“Besides keeping in touch with news, I did nothing specific to prepare for Acumen,” he added.

His teammate Gautham Krishnan is a first year student at IIM Bangalore. He completed his schooling from Bangalore, then graduated in Production Engineering from NIT Trichy in 2005 to work with Maruti Udyog Ltd for an year in the Product Planning and Development department.

He is no beginner to debating, and has organized and won a number of literary events as a member of ‘Balls by Picasso’, the English Literary society of NIT, Trichy. He hasn’t really debated much before, he says. “This was my first major debate, so to speak,” he adds. Like Venkat, Gauthan too prepared for the Acumen debate by ‘just keeping track of the happenings in the world of business’. Gautham enjoys quizzing, watching Formula One, reading PG Wodehouse and Indian epical novels.

Meanwhile, Prasad Shetty, who has been part of winning teams at Acumen since the last two years refused to let his magic die at the Acumen 2006 South Zone Alumni Quiz. His teammate in the victorious act was Vishwajit, an alumni of KIMS-Dharwad.

A big hand to all the Acumen 2006 South Zone winners!