At six fifteen in the morning I get a call from Rashmi “we need to finish the team presentation. Maya and I are leaving for IIM now. We’ll meet you there at seven.”

Seven?!?!

Susa and I met at the gate, and after a few wrong turns in the sprawling maze of vegetation and stone that the IIM campus is we reached the NSR-GIV centre. Forty-five minutes late though.

The ladies were sweet about it though.

After lots of hair-pulling about colours, bubbles, arrows and whether the boxes should have smooth or round corners, our presentation was ready. It was quite different from the presentations I’ve done in the past year as an intern in CMC - which are usually text, text and more text, with a couple of pictures and graphs which few people understood or cared to.

I won’t go into how we decided who’ll present which slides. It’s complicated!

We met the other teams - Pro_Actives with Krushi, Varsha and Harshita who were heading to Arakku Valley near Vizag to work with Samatha, an NGO working with tribals; Sepia had Phani, Shailee and Shruti with Abhimanyu in absentia. They were headed to Baruipur to work with children of sex workers.

We were given a slightly claustrophobic room in the the NSR block, crowded with kidney shaped desks and chairs. The guy in charge was kind enough not too needle us to clear out, as is the wont of his ilk , even though we finished at seven in the night.

There were talks scheduled till seven in the evening. We started with Abhilash followed by Keki later telling us about the genesis of Yofa and grassroutes. Interesting, they’d actually given up a year after starting - fulfilling predictions of failure. But those very same predictions spurred them to get things running again.

Each of the teams made presentations about what we’d done so far and what we were going to do next. Hunt around and you’ll find Rashmi’s award-winning performance!

The last two sessions were the most relevant to us - Abhilash on blogging and Dhempe and Raghu from Falunge on moviemaking. Both revolved around getting high quality blogs and movies out of us. I hope we translate their talks into action! With the exception of Susa none of us are tech-savvy!

After that things were crazy - we eventually decided to go to Keeki’s place for Pizza. It took ages to get from BTM to the inner ring road thanks to peak hour traffic and rain. The Pizza came only at ten, again thanks to the rain!