TiEcon 2009 – this is how it began

I never thought a non-P@SHA event would energize me as much as TiEcon 2009 did yesterday (and no it is not because I am on the TiE Karachi Governing Council). Sabeen Mahmud, the President of the TiE Karachi Chapter, and I weren’t really too hyped up about the event because there were too many other things that were preying on our minds – topmost being the fact that Zak is in hospital after a severe heart attack followed by a 4-hour bypass. When a friend who means so much is ill, everything else takes a back seat.

However, it was a responsibility that we had taken on and there was no way that we were going to let down so many people who had worked hard to put the event together and the many more who had registered to be there. So we dragged ourselves to the Sheraton Hotel in Karachi yesterday. We were there at 8 a.m. although the event was not supposed to start until 9 a.m.

The Torque team were taking care of everything so there wasn’t really much for us to do at that stage. As Sabeen said, things were probably under control and if they weren’t, it was really too late to worry about it. So we went downstairs to the coffee shop to get our caffeine ‘fix’. We were soon joined by Adil Moosajee in his Mr. Happy t-shirt, shorts and flip flops. He was one of the speakers for the day. Adil is a nice sort and easy and fun to hang out with. So we chilled, talked about his presentation which he was only just putting together .

The event started at 9.15 am. By this time there were already 200 attendees with more slowly trickling in. The stage was in the centre with several tiers of seats all around – a formula that had worked the previous year and so why knock it?

The proceedings started with Sabeen giving a little introduction about TiE and the program for the day. And then we were on!