Motor show and movie night

'Accounting' is the word that is on everybody's lips these days. It is the one subject that almost everybody seems to struggle with and the tension is increasing as the Accounting Exam on 21 March comes closer. A group of people, including myself and my girlfriend who was visiting for the weekend, nevertheless took the morning train to the Geneva Motor Show. Since I was a kid I have read hundreds of magazines and newspapers with pictures of the new car models revealed on the big shows in Detroit, Tokyo, Frankfurt and Geneva. Now that I am living right next to one of them, I am for sure not going to miss the opportunity.

The Hummer was there and so was Rolls-Royce, but it was clear that the two main themes on the car makers agenda these days are 'global warming' and 'financial crisis'. Most of the major brands were showing off their latest hybrid and bio-fuel models. It was interesting to note how all these cars were painted white. It is undoubtedly supposed to make them appear 'clean' and 'scientifically advanced'. It was also interesting to note that the old proxy for fuel efficiency 'kilometer per liter' or 'miles per gallon' has disappeared. Now we are talking about 'Grams of CO2 per kilometer'. One cannot help making a connection to the Economics assignment on climate change that we finished just two days ago.

Rasmus Figenschou [Norwegian] has established a movie club that will show a movie each sunday evening in the auditorium. Today was the first show and the movie was '12 Angry Men', an old black-and-white Henry Fonda movie. The movie is also homework for the next 'Leading People for Performance' class and is about a jury of 12 men that must reach a verdict on a homicide case. As the movie starts 11 men find the defendant guilty and one man, Henry Fonda of course, finds him 'not guilty'. It only adds to the tension that they are locked into a room on a warm and humid evening. From there we follow their discussion on how they reach their verdict. A couple of months ago I wouldn't have thought a lot of this movie, but now it is impossible not to analyze and interpret all the things going on between these men, both on the surface and below. I think most of us found ourselves drawing parallels to our study groups.