by Ragoo Raghunathan

This month's PEN event - 'Open Networking - Inspire and be Inspired' was a great success if you ask me. We had over 40 registrations and most of them attended the event, given that it was the Easter weekend and many had plans that were not on their minds when they registered for the event. In any case we had a great turn out. This time the event was based around getting to know the fellow attendees, their profession, interests and hobbies - all in the efforts to make a stronger membership and more wholesome ISW-PEN initiative.

We started off with introductions of the newly recruited committee members - Resmi Nair, Milind Kanitkar and Tejas Shah. While Kelly and I co-hosted the event as co-chairs we welcomed at least 8 new faces in the audience. These were people who had heard about our initiative through their friends and other networks, and were attending for the first time. The goal of this event was also to collect ideas on what sorts of events we could hold in the upcoming months, and which area each one of the attendees would be comfortable contributing in. We had 2 white board full of ideas and we are organizing them in sub groups. You will all hear more about this in the upcoming newsletter write-ups. The event ended with some creative, out-of-the box card stacking and tower building skills from the audience - which turned out to be a fantastic team building activity and brought out some laughs and arguments justifying their creations.

Overall, it was an enjoyable morning over the yummy samosas and chai while the audience got to socialize before and after the event.