Fisher Follies to Dinner at Bendapudis
Last week we went to Neeli’s place for Dinner.
Neeli Bendapudi is the marketing professor at Fisher College of Business. She took the core mcourse in marketing for us. She is also the Director of the IMS (Initiative for Managing Services) organization at FCOB. She is a mesmerizing speaker, a multinational knowledge bank and an inspiring professor.
Its always exciting to be at or around Neeli’s. Love and knowledge keeps pouring in every second. Neeli regularly throws a party for the IMBA (Indian MBA Association) and I was part of that trip in my first quarter. It was a memorable experience.
This visit had an interesting story attached to it. The story goes on like this:
In Fisher , there is an event called “Fisher Follies” where we get to bid and we get to auction different goods and services. It’s like a real market, but the only difference is that all the money goes to welfare (non- profit organization).
I thought if there is a market at play, as an ardent fan of economics, I should sell an economics book. I bought the book “Freakonomics” by Steven Levitt. I also got it autographed by one of our very finest finance professor Karen Wruck and put it up for auction. The price of the book was $ 14 and it got sold for $ 36. Some were selling dance lessons. Some were selling dating escorts. One was selling his haircut - you can give him his next haircut.
So among all these, Neeli was auctioning a dinner party at her house. We could not resist it. We teamed up together and bought the deal. There were two parties bidding for the deal and at the end we won. Later on we also invited the runners up bidders to join us for the dinner (after taking consent from Neeli).
The dinner party was awesome. We had a caterer serving us drinks and food. We played games. Prof. Venkat Bendapudi showed us his collection of bikes and scotch. We watched movie at her home theater and it was a once in a lifetime experience.
Looking forward to next year’s Fisher Follies Auction!