I was invited to inaugurate Innowiz 2008 at Velammal Engineering College, and release their souvenir in Chennai on August 29, 2008.

Innowiz 2008 is a national level technical symposium to excite young students to innovate and prove their talents through various competitions that was planned during the day.

The foundation for this educational institution and its inspiration is Velammal, a humble rustic lady from a rural background.  With a strong conviction and determination to contribute to the society,   her philosophy was quite simple, yet profound - “you take care of the society and the society will take care of you”.  This has become the foundation in building the world class educational institutions which is known after her name as Velammal Educational Institutions.  The sprawling campus has exquisite surroundings and provides breathtaking views of Red Hills Lake from its top most floors.

One of the leading self financing engineering colleges under Anna University, Velammal Engineering College is known for its great discipline. The meeting commenced on time and I had the privilege to spend some time with the Principal and other dignitaries before the programme had commenced. Dr J Shanmugam, Principal of the college was in air force for a long time, he was on field duty during the Bangladesh war.  I always admire people in defense, their posture, and character reveals that they are from a defense background.  Seeing him, I could easily feel his contribution towards the great discipline which is enforced in the college right from the security gate, reception counter, class rooms, laboratories, rest rooms and so on.

In my talk therefore I chose modern day warfare and connected the same to their aspirations, The essence of my speech is as follows: 

In today’s flat economy with great interdependence amongst nations, staging wars have become a distant possibility.  Removal of trade barriers has increased cross country economic transactions and increased media awareness.  Internet has won over the barriers hitherto posed by ethnicity, religions, castes and political ideologues.  Stray incidents like Russia Vs Georgia or the age-old Palestinian and Israel problem do happen, but today the only country that seems to have a right to wage war is US. 

Various international treaties and trade dependencies ensure that we can no longer use or test nuclear weapons or missiles the way we desire.  Therefore even if we have intercontinental ballistic missiles, we cannot use them just like that.  International watchdogs and compulsions provide a safeguard against usage of such weapons.  In olden days, war used to be the only way to establish supremacy, and several such wars were waged which is history - Mughals, Alexander, British Invasion etc are examples to these.

Today the medium of war is changed, now wars are fought in the arena of sports, trade and technology.  When China spends billions of US dollars to organize Olympics, the message essentially conveyed to the rest of the world through its exceptional organizing skills and forty gold medals is – Catch me if you can?

Now it is the turn of India to make such statements through contributions in technology and well planned trading.  The ideal time to make this a possibility is now and students should start focusing on innovation and train their minds towards thinking differently. We should remember that when Newton discovered law of gravitation and Albert Einstein discovered Law of relativity theory they were in their 20’s. 

 India becoming a superpower by 2015 also depends on how effectively the student generations of today can perform and what they can contribute towards the development of our economy as a whole.