Since the conference was happening right before a 3-day weekend (Id-Milad) we decided to all go then spend a couple nights in a nearby Hill Station in the Eastern Ghats afterwards.
It turns out that the Chancellor of the university (of all universities, I guess) is the Governor, so he wasn't present, but the Vice-Chancellor really runs the university. The VC was also a distinguished speaker at the talk and it turns out he's a biologist (quite accomplished) by training. Pretty cool to have a scientist in that position. He gave a really nice talk. A little stranger was the concluding talk by the ?Registrar? Chief-Testing Office? who proceeded to tell the assembly that he thought a conference on climate change was not necessary because the earth is so huge that it can handle any amount of pollution produced by Industry and there's no need to worry. I almost stood up and said something but since he'd spoken in Tamil for about 3/4 of his talk I wasn't sure of how much I'd missed and figured I'd just let it go. But aside from that, the conference was a good experience and I'm glad I was there.