Day 481:17th Jan, 2011

Apart from one FRA class in the morning, spent mostly the entire day in the process. Pretty long one that. First a one-hour handwritten analysis on a 16-page case, followed by a discussion on that same thing. Next up was a kind of a soft skill activity, crafts more precisely :D. And last of all, a preliminary assessment interview, which I rocked so much! :P

The good news was that my good friend Haathi really truly aced the process, and was the sole guy on campus to end up with an offer. Awesome! This post is dedicated to him \m/

Pretty exhausted from the whole thing though. Will get some good amount of sleep. Retiring for the day @ a super-early 11.00pm. Cya!

Day 352: 28th Aug, 2010

Sorry for the delayed post. Yesterday night the net conked off abruptly for a few hours.

Can't help but rave about what a brilliant course Team Building is! :D . What else can you say when you can coolly play Bridge for 3 hours, and directly go give your paper! And me being me, even managed to finish the exam and submit the paper in an hour. (Sadly (?), I don't have much globe-ing skills.)

Restarted HIMYM! (Why do such things happen ONLY during exams?!) Had reached some place in season 5, continued from there on. Saw a few more episodes; it's watchable ONLY because of Barney now :D . Oh, and Robin ;-) . I thought I'll finish off with Season 5 (that's the end, right?), par mere saath dhoka ho gaya! Turned out episode 22 which I downloaded didn't have the sound working properly :( . And as I said, no net - so this is put off for tomorrow.

Day 336: 12th Aug, 2010

Mannnnn.. Team Building is SUCH an awesome course! :D . To any faccha who's reading this, please bid for this course next year, it's worth it! Today we were shown a movie (Chak de India!) for 3 hours, and asked to write an assignment then and there, on the various challenges faced by the team and the roles/qualities of a leader. Awesome!

Had a not-so-short (high euphemism) afternoon siesta today. The peculiarity of today's sleep was that my dream/semi-reality state seemed to have suddenly been influenced by the infinite book - Atlas Shrugged. The book espouses on Ayn Rand's philosophy of Individualism. And that the society exploits the brilliant mind on their very virtues. So every time I felt like waking up, I remember telling myself that I am going to get exploited by the world, and so I would go back to sleep! Weird, and convenient ;-)

Alas, these siestas get negated by the fact that I am sleeping pretty late these days. It's 5 am already. Once again, my room was subject to a raid by the INDEX facchas - a little bit for work and a little bit for CV verification. They are doing a decent job of both.

Day 326: 1st Aug, 2010 - Khel Khel Mei!

Super fun Sunday - had our Outbound session for Team Building. Basically you would be involved in a lot of group activities, and through these interventions you would be able to practically realise and apply the theoretical concepts in the course. Simplified - Basically you get 3 lectures worth of attendance for enjoying :D . For the people who also have SBN, it was a killer - they would get another 3 lectures worth of attendance!

But attendance was no big deal. The experience was superb. A team from STEP Consulting had come down to arrange the whole thing. We played a lot of fancy games; and all the games had fancy names (show-baazi)!

1. River Crossing:

We had to go upstream (against the slope)/downstream (along the slope) on a rope, suspending ourselves upside down, gripping the rope only with our hands (unlike a monkey crawl, where we also use our feet). Puppa decided to forsake the toss and go first - turned out to be a wrong decision :-P

2. Chair Making and Selling

Resources given - wood, nails.

Bid for: A saw

Objective: Win a saw. Build a chair. Sell at a profit.

Simple enough. Revisited the workshop experience I had during engineering! 

I was basically hammering the nails; even hammered my own thumb once.

3. Rappelling 

Needed to be done individually. Long wait for the turn, but the 2 floor climb happened too quickly. Not as exciting as I would have liked it to be.

4. Magic Mats

All the team members had to get across from one side to another, always stepping on the tiny mats provided, without ever coming into contact with the ground (otherwise the whole group has to restart!) and without losing contact with any mat (lest it would be taken away!). Showed how your mistake can harm the entire group!

5. Free Fall

Now this one was real fun :D . A group of people standing opposite to each other would keep their hands parallel to the ground, close to each other, forming a "web". And one person had to "free fall" backwards on this web - basically an act in which you trust your team mates to come to your aid. I was really surprised as to how some people just could make themselves fall properly!

6. Perfect Square

Find out a piece of rope on the ground, make a perfect square of it and have all team members standing on its side. Sounds very easy right? Oh, I forgot to add - everyone was blindfolded :D . And what a mess it was! Though I guess we did a decent job :)

7. Brick Mines

A little similar to Magic Mats. We needed to step on some bricks, and also have constant human contact with a brick. What created chaos was that 4 groups were asked to do it simultaneously!

The set of activities started off at 9 am and went on till 6.30. Pretty tired by now! Guess it's time to hit the bottle (I mean Volini) again.

Day 316: 22nd Jul, 2010

I have no clue how I missed this!! Played SQUASH yesterday at Umang. My first time in a squash court. I would love to say it was a great experience and blah blah. Except for the fact it wasn't - that it lasted for 4-5 min - in which Mr. Professional Vanki COMPREHENSIVELY beat me! :-( . Won't reveal scores to avoid public embarassment :P

The team building class was FUN! :D (They always are! - don't miss this elective!). We made greeting cards :D . Sketch pen marks on the palm and all at the end of it :D

Spent a good part of the evening taking the mid-term reviews of facchas. Decent work by some of them; and as expected, a few of them backed out. Sometimes, it is interesting to see how a system filters people out just by existing. In the sense, we hadn't even put much pressure. But somehow, there are always people who don't want to clear the smallest of hurdles. Why? - May be they can't see the finish, but then again, may be, they just are that way.

Day 288: 24th Jun, 2010

So Pachpan decided to remain all rolled up in his bed, banking on a proxy for his first class. I had already refused to do this (seriously, no giving/taking proxy from/for me) and therefore the focus was shifted to Vanki. At the last moment, he felt it was not possible. And it was fun (a little sadistic :-p) to see Pachpan's reaction at this discovery in the next class :-p

Spent 3 whole hours in the afternoon getting the INDEX room cleaned. Was a major cleaning exercise. Disposed off a whole lot of old redundant stuff ! The room looks super spacious now. And eerily clean :-p

We had our team building class in the evening today as we were supposed to have an outdoor activity. And man, what an activity it turned out to be. Basically, we were divided into teams and each of us had to go from A to B WITHOUT any member's feet touching the ground. Before you start imagining us doing Rajnikanth or Mithun da level stunts, let me tell you our modus operandi. We all had a limited number of thermocols, newspapers, etc. and we make our way by stepping on these. Now, if you can imagine this happening, the first person bends a little, puts something ahead, steps on it. Everyone in the middle just take a step ahead and pass the sheet coming from the back to the front. But the last person has to completely bend after every step, reach out and pick the material left behind and pass it ahead. So you can imagine - for 200 odd steps in our path - that person had to do some 200 quick and successive sit-ups along with other movements. I guess by now you would have understood I was the last person in my team. And in short - totally lagg gayi !

But the post-activity analysis had 2 useful things that I came across:

1. For all members of a team to give their best, there has to be a strong sense of a Common Purpose.

2. It is very essential (and practically quite difficult) to identify the weak link (may be a person, activity, process anything) and give it support.

Had the presentations today in the induction. They sure are fun :D 

Also celebrated the mad man's birthday. The fellow got bashed up, but I guess still much less than what he does :-p . 

Day 281: 17th Jun, 2010

Had an interesting exercise in team building today. A fictitious situation - a group of people were trapped inside a cave and rescue operations were happening such that only one person could be brought out every hour. Meanwhile, the cave was getting filled up with water and there was a high chance of a cave-in, killing all those still trapped inside.

A brief write up about every participant was provided. What we were supposed to do is try and come up with a ranking - an order of priority in which the participants would be brought out.

Quite interesting. So many perspectives even within one team. And across teams - there were still more differences. Arising out of the various approaches adopted by different teams. And all this even though the basic parameters employed by the teams turned out to be similar.

What we learnt finally, is that even though we consciously avoid NOT to make assumptions, we still somehow end up doing so. Just like I am assuming there are readers of this blog even now :-p . LOL.

Day 274: 10th Jun, 2010 - Zoo Zoo :-p

So is it my EAGLE that is making me write this blog? Or is it the SALMON which is trying to rebel against popular notions that were expressed about the impossibility of sustaining this endeavour? Confused? Don't worry. This was what happened in the 3-hour "short"(in the prof's words - ?!?) lecture on team building. As how would you understand others if you didn't understand yourself! Logically sound, except that at the end of the class, it made me feel I was in a zoo rather above anything else :-p

There is something anti-visionary about Lucknow. No pun intended, I only was referring to my spectacles. After breaking my specs 6 times in the first year, I had a two month long summers stint at Bombay, during the course of which my specs fell down at least twice, and escaped unhurt and intact. Day 1 in Lucknow - I put my specs inside the case just before I go to sleep. Morning the case falls down. And the specs - inside the case - breaks! :-S . Argghhh!! Accompanied Dhams to the city (who maintains his record of registering late), gave my specs for repairing on the way. Tried negotiating, but unsuccessful :-(

Had a long overdue INDEX meet. In our new room. Convenient :-p