Sunday, August 28, 2005

A Refresher

This kavidhai was written by my classmate, Mr. Giridharan.

Friday, August 05, 2005

Rendezvous 2005 - Minutes of Meet

Date: 31st July 2005
Venue: Apoorva's Sangeetha
Attendees:
Sindura
Amudha
Ravi Kumar
Jayaganesh
Govind
Balamurali
Giridharan
Kannappan
Selvarathinam
Vijay Kumar
Krishnamoorthy
Sivakumar
Raja
Ashok Kumar
Nagamaiya Karthik
Lakshmi Narasimman
Jismon
Manikandan
Ganapathy Raja
Muthukumar

Here I go with the Abridged version of the meet!

The actual time for the function to start was 4 PM. But we beingIndians started it around 5 o clock. Muthu and Ashok were the oneswho first came to the venue. I went there around 3.30. We did somedecoration work (You would have seen the chart that was stuck on thescreen).Later Amudha came there with her kid (Naveen). I thought of startingthe show differently. I gave a piece of paper to everyone. Each oneof them should write something about themself in the paper. It maybe an incident that happened in the class or anything related to theperson. A person would pick a paper and read it out to others. Withthe given clue, the person has to be identified.The game started with Krishnamoorthy. I guess the guys had real fun.We were pulling each other's legs. It was great fun. It got over by7-715. We started our dinner by 730.In between we exchanged our addresses, fone numbers and othercontact details.

It was great fun to meet my friends after a long time. I wish we could arrange for something similar with more participants in the future.

Rendezvous 2005 - Pirandha Kadhai

It was Friday, 29th July. We have started a new trend at work. We allot one hour every Friday for fun and games. Being in Cognizant you need to celebrate work. I was so excited, it was not because of the Friday fun. But it was because the "D" day was nearer.

I never enjoyed my college days, especially when I was doing my MCA. I always wanted to come back home. But I missed those days once I graduated. I took a resolution that I would stay in touch with my classmates. I initiated this get-together plan in April/June 2004. The response from my classmates were very poor. Hardly 10 people were ready to join us. The excitement with which I started shooting e-mails to our group faded as days went by. I couldn't understand why these people were so indifferent. They didn't even bother to reply the mails that I sent. At that time, all my friends had a valid reason. Most of them were unemployed.

After one year, once again I started mailing them on the get-together. This time there were quite a few additional responses. I created a database for people to update their contact details. In addition, I also created polls to get an idea on what each person has in his/her mind. But once again my efforts failed. There were hardly 10 entries in the poll/database.

I coordinated with Mohi, who happens to be the moderator of our group and removed the people whose e-mail address had expired. We tried tracking the whereabouts of all our classmates. By then the plans once again flopped.

All of a sudden, Govind who was our class representative, sent an e-mail saying that the get-together will happen on 31st July. I was really excited. But I still had my own doubts if people would really turn-up. Most of them were abroad and we didn't have contact details of 50% of people. But Govind did a neat job. He somehow found the contact details of our classmates and he communicated with them from Delhi.

We finalized the date. Then came the question of Venue. Initially, we thought of having it in Spencer's Plaza, Chennai. But I felt the place would be too crowded on Sunday and we won't have enough privacy and space. The next option was to hire a resort and go there. But once again, we thought of commuting. Some of our friends were placed in Bangalore. It will be difficult for them to start early on 31st. So I gave a suggestion that we can hire a hall and have the function there.

God was on our side. One of our friends, Muthu, is working at the Hotel Sangeetha. I contacted him and asked him to enquire the hall charges and food charges. We finally fixed the Vadapalani hall for the function. We also fixed the timings as 4 P.M to 7 P.M.

I started calling people from Friday evening to remind them of the meeting. I did some shopping too. I got pens and scribbling pads for them. I even tried to paint a banner. Unfortunately it didn't come out well. Still we displayed it in the hall.

To know how the get-together went, wait for my next blog....