Life seems to move at warp speed in this icy corner of concentrated power. At least it does so for one week in January.

For inquiring minds, there’s no other place in the world where so much distilled wisdom is readily on offer. But not everybody’s a fan.

Among mild malcontents are Davos natives who, perhaps understandably, resent the growing invasion of limos, Polizei and hordes of badge-wearing foreigners they disdainfully refer to as “Weffers”. Some of them are more irritated than others.

A B-grade snooker bar close to the Congress Centre, which revels in the name of Walhalla, displays a board warning Weffers to stay away. There’s little open hostility from other locals. But get them talking and you find they’re counting the hours until the World Economic Forum (WEF) entourage departs, allowing the village to settle back into gentility.

Through all of this, the Weffers themselves seem blissfully unaware of the ruction they’re causing the country folk, cheerfully bestowing a “Morgen” here and a “Danke” there. For them, there’s just too much to absorb.

And, besides, the rich, powerful and successful rarely dwell on trivialities like offences to villagers. That message came through in a different way during my first engagement of Davos Day Two.

After a 2:30am finish (writing, not partying this time) it was up before dawn and a 20-minute walk to an early morning Deutsche Bank-sponsored breakfast with the encouraging title of Building India as an Economic Powerhouse.

The presentation emphasised once again how the Indian government and business works as a team. They have taken the Davos bit between their collective teeth and are milking every possible ounce of marketing out of the event. Sometimes a little too obviously.

All went smoothly for the first part of the panel’s presentation. A united Indian Front was evident, painting the country as a sustainable economic success story “on a tryst with destiny” to overtake the US by 2050 – maybe ten to 15 years sooner if they could get a few things together sooner than now anticipated.

But there was something very different to the modest enthusiasm of Indian presentations I’d previously been exposed to.

For starters, these speakers abused their audience quite openly by ignoring their allotted time. And snide comments about their more populous neighbour beggared belief for anyone with first hand experience of the contrast between China’s infrastructural efficiency and the chaos in India.

But where the spinning exercise went off the rails was when the first non-Indian panelist, Blackstone Private Equity founder Stephen Shwarzman, made his contribution. Blackstone, for the initiated, is a $50bn financial services business and ranks among the world’s top three private-equity firms.

Mostly positive, Shwarzman balanced his presentation by warning the audience that in the financials services space, Indian professional staff are neither cheap nor plentiful. What really irked his hosts, though, was relaying his practical experience of how eight months after arriving in Mumbai, the firm’s “office” is still in a hotel room. Blackstone was the victim, first, of a crooked middleman and then because there was no available commercial space.

Shwarzman also politely questioned valuations being ascribed by Indians to there companies and, especially, India’s property bubble where Mumbai prices have risen 10-fold in 18 months.

The American’s honest reflections went down like a lead balloon.

Members of Team India grew restless again when John Ainley, head of offshore services at British insurance giant Aviva, noted that there is growing resistance from the company’s UK clients to dealing with the Indian-based call centres. Despite this, he said he had no regrets on his decision to having established his operation there, in preference to the alternative, South Africa.

Although criticism by Ainley and Schwarzman was couched in polite terms, this clearly wasn’t in the script. The reaction from the floor, and indeed the panel itself, was disappointing. It left neutrals considering whether an earlier claim that India is “confident” rather than “arrogant” was more hopeful than accurate.

IDC executive Geoffrey Qhena was also in the audience. I joined him after he’d buttonholed Ainley to gather some intelligence on why the decision had gone against SA. The reason was purely economic, the Aviva man explained, with telecoms costs the major culprit. “It’s a real pity [Telkom CEO] Papi [Molotsane] wasn’t here?” Qhena grumbled as we left the room.

Seems I wasn’t the only one who had hoped for better from the breakfast presentation. By the time the last speaker sat down, the audience had shrunk by more than half. Weffers don’t stand on ceremony. They vote with their feet. For me, it was also a reminder that not all Indian businessmen are like Ratan Tata, the genuinely modest, engaging chief of the group that bears his family’s name.

Next came a forgettable session on cultural issues for cross border mergers (not all Davos items are winners). But that was followed by the highlight of my day.

The WEF’s Media Fellows programme is one of the great attractions of this event for yours truly. Apart from affording full participation status (“reporting media” has limited access) being part of the Fellows brings opportunities to interview some of the world’s highest profile personalities in a small group.

First of these opportunities at Davos 2007 was with Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz (56). He was always going to be a class act. How else would you perceive one who described his decision in 1999 to resign as the head of Citigroup’s worldwide Private Banking division as one of entering “national service” when the new government persuaded him to join as finance minister.

In so doing, the urbane Aziz swapped a Park Avenue address and seven-figure salary for a ten-year-old Toyota, a subsequent al-Qaeda assassination attempt (in which his driver and seven others were killed) and the key economic post in a country whose financial position was dire.

Aziz, I quickly discovered with an ice-breaking compliment, is also a cricket fan. Had there not been other journalists present, he’d have delighted in talking more about the sport, expanding into a full-blown discussion comments about the “difficult” South African strips compared with the merely “tricky” wickets back in Pakistan.

When it comes to the serious matter of running his country, though, Aziz is pure business. And mightily impressive too. After explaining about the importance to the region of a settlement of the Kashmiri and Palestinian questions, he moved on to Afghanistan drug production and how this is funding the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

That opened the way for my further investigation on whether experts here are under-estimating the terrorism threat and in the process being too optimistic on global growth forecasts. No pricking of the Davos 2007 buoyancy by Aziz: “Definitely not, what is happening now justifies our actions against terrorists and shows we’re doing well.”

His black suit, white shirt and golden tie aside, Aziz’s confidence and easy manner helps him come across as every bit the global executive comfortable operating at the very highest level. He has the record to justify that confidence politically as well.

Since taking over seven years ago, his structural reforms have transformed the Pakistan basket case into one of the world’s best performing economies with the nation’s reserves up ten fold since he took over, and annual GDP growth over 7%.

A breath of fresh air, Aziz overturned my perceptions of his country. Cementing it by taking the trouble to explain how women’s rights is near the top of agenda in the Islamic nation: “We’re trying to help the women of Pakistan breath easier; they have to be involved in every facet of our life. We now have women officers in the army and last week qualified our first six female jet fighter pilots.”

Some self-indulgence followed through an hour spent in a media-focused luncheon, one of a number featured on the Davos programme. Plenty of great ideas gleaned which we’ll be trying out on Moneyweb in the next few months.

More broadly, though, the theme of this discussion was in stark contrast to 12 months back. In 2006 media leaders were mostly hedging their bets in the internet vs newspaper debate. That intellectual war is now over in broadband-enabled countries. The internet’s continued rapid growth (and newspaper contraction) has turned it into a one horse race.

The most memorable quote from the session came from New York Times’s publisher Arthur Sulzberger’s reference to a counterpart cautioning that newspaper owners should “be careful not to commit suicide out of fear of dying.” Sulzberger added his outfit now boasts twice as many online as newspaper readers.

I reluctantly left the media lunch early to link up with Philippe Amon, chairman of Swiss-based Sicpa. He is one of the panelists in the illicit trade session I’m facilitating on Friday evening. Informal and engaging, Amon knows SA well, and counts stockbroker Sidney Frankel (and his late father Leslie) among his close friends.

Sicpa has expanded out of its dominant global position of anti-banknote counterfeiting. It is now a leading international adviser to national governments and central banks on how to fight international crime syndicates.

An hour’s conversation with Amon is like a cold shower for those with an instinctive belief in the goodness of mankind.

But it’s also reassuring in a bizarre way to appreciate that SA is not alone in its struggle against the cancer of excessive crime – and because of its relatively contained market and sophisticated anti-money laundering weapons, is better positioned than most countries to beat the odds.

Another fascinating Media Fellows interview followed on a day (and night) when there was hardly time to catch your icy breath.

Until this point, apart from seeing his face on Sky News, I didn’t know much about David Cameron. Except that he’s just turned 40 and as the leader of Britain’s opposition Conservative Party he should one day become prime minister of one of SA’s closest allies.

He stared at me a touch too long before the conference started, probably because mine was the only face around the table he didn’t recognise. The British media are chummy with their politicians and Cameron was on first name terms with virtually everybody else in the room.

Cameron is very smooth and his Oxford education comes through in an appealing cut glass accent and intelligent delivery. But at this stage I wouldn’t fancy his chances in a head-to-head debate against his obvious opponent, British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

One area that needs work is his attention to detail. Most obviously when he answered my question on whether a Cameron-led government would be as much a friend to the continent as Afro-optimist Blair’s.

The politician in Cameron came to the fore, claiming Blair has merely carried on a relationship begun by one his predecessor, former Conservative Party leader and PM John Major (somewhat generous methinks).

On the attention to detail side, Cameron might have been suffering from brain freeze, which is not difficult in the minus ten degrees that “sunny” Davos experienced on the day.

But to prove his intentions towards Africa are honourable, he spoke of having visited SA recently to “meet with President Mandela” – still not sure whether he meant Mbeki or if he really was referring to Madiba.

Alec Hogg – Moneyweb. South Africa