Pic(s)nic

Gone all those days when people spend a portion of their savings for holidays. It’s the age when people pay in EMI’s to enjoy their holidays. EMI used to be an abbreviation for Equated Monthly Installments but now it is Easy Monthly Installments. That’s the change in people’s perspective. Going for a vacation tops the to do list for many. But there are people who have never gone for a vacation. They are very reluctant in spending time and money towards this. So these days, corporates organize a fully paid vacation (popularly known as ‘offsite’) to build a bonding among employees and especially for those kind of people who are not interested in holidaying. This is about one such offsite organized by our office.

The excitement started when we received a mail from our HR partner informing about the vacation. None of us actually remember when was last such tour organized. Many of my friends completed their shopping for the vacation even before the date was finalized. I generally wake up to my alarm. But this day was an exception. I switched off the alarm before it could ring. This shows how excited we were.

Three buses were arranged for pick up from office. Even though many of us were on the way to the resort, we came to office to enjoy the ride with our friends. Finally we reached our destination where we spent our next 24 hours with so much fun and frolic.

Tender coconut water (the most nutritious beverage the nature has provided) as a welcome drink was welcomed by everyone. It took us a while to search for our rooms. We were used to the high storeyed hotels where in the room numbers can be identified by floor numbers. But that was not the case in a resort wherein a room was like an independent house. Fewer sign boards for the directions made our life even harder.

After checking into our rooms we had a free time of nearly two hours before the team bonding events were supposed to start. So we all decided to play our adopted national sport, cricket. We played absorbing cricket for nearly 2 hours. After a sumptuous lunch there came the team bonding activities. A Head start to the team bonding events was given by one of our partner. Event manager pointed a question at him – “Name ten women colleges in Chennai”. His answer included a college which was an all men college and he justified his answer by asking “whether the question was to name where women study or where women are being studied?” Everyone burst into laughter. We were then grouped into 4 teams of 21 each. One activity was to dress up one of our team member as a tribal leader and to showcase our dancing talents by dancing like tribal people. Our team did an animal sacrifice sequence in the dance which won the points for us.

In the evening, dance floor was opened and at the same time even the skies opened up. But that didn’t stop our MJs and J Los to hide away. They were dancing even in the heavy down pour. The DJ’s actually extended the time upto nearly an hour. We won’t get tired so easily. Will we? No one ever wanted the day to end so soon. But all good things come to an end. Everyone was back into the rooms with their own gangs. There is nothing interesting than playing cards with your own bunch of people and chit chatting. The topic for discussion was much more exciting than playing cards – Who all boozed up in the evening? There were few hits and misses and also surprises but finally the number was quite high.

It was a memorable day for every one of us and we tried to capture everything with a DSLR Camera. There were approximately 800 clicks which added nearly 3 GB of data to the digital world. This was followed by sharing the pictures in facebook and picasa which has become more of a ritual these days.