An evening with Chris

Chris Guillebeau came to Bangalore, India this December. It was for the book signing event of his latest book "$100 startup", which comes with quite an amusing tag line that you can see in the picture below:

Also, in a corner, Chris himself

And the man who traveled 180 countries (and counting), curator of many recipes for world domination (without using a shrinking ray gun, yes), and the author of a book which calls out to fire your own boss, stood there in the middle of a small bookstore, in the middle of a curious bunch of people, and talked about entrepreneurship, and stuff.

I wasn't much of a follower of Chris until then, and the plan was to get started with it at this event. The QA session was interesting with the shared experiences of assorted people. Traditional work and Entrepreneurship was the main topic under scrutiny. Several views were tossed around, like how work can in fact give experience in starting your own business, how some people do work for work (not because they don't have a choice), and most interestingly, how entrepreneurship is not always about building billion dollar companies, but also about simple self sustenance.

The event's attraction wasn't Chris alone, but the whole environment. The audience themselves were a collection of interesting people. Ideas were floating around, plans discussed, and motivation was in the air. Chris was apparently happy to know from me that at least one person in the group did read Haruki Murakami and thought his novels were great.

I walked away with a Chris-signed book, had a very colorful and vivid dinner with my friends, and all the while we were discussing ideas and more ideas.