Diwali at ATN

How does it start? Vijay and Nishant start planning diwali celebrations before everyone leaves for their respective hometowns to celebrate the festival of lights and/or vacations with their family members. The day decided is Wednesday i.e. the 27th of October, 2010. Activities incharge were unanimously chosen (no one else was even considered actually :P) as Vinaya and me.

So, then after a lot of contemplation whether the event should be done etc, should it be TTMM etc it was only when Vinay showed a lot of enthusiasm for the event, did all the fun start. Finally we decided on Monday afternoon that we will go ahead with the celebration.
We started planning the games. Tuesday evening was when we really started getting things done. First we got gifts from BB, fun gifts all nicely gift wrapped. Clues for treasure hunt were finalised, chits ready and hidden :) Kumar is a great help while hiding clues. So next time you know there is a treasure hunt, follow Kumar the previous evening :D
Now, last time we made a mistake in the treasure hunt. We left a huge backdoor (it wasn't even a backdoor. It was pretty straight forward silly on our part :)) So this time we made sure we had all our tracks covered. We iterated-re-iterated all the clues as if we were playing and saw that nothing was wrong.
But then, we have to make some mistake right. We'll come to that part later though. The next game we designed was Dumb C++, where the team enacts and one guesses. We jotted down movies that hopefully all would have watched atleast once, leaving aside ones that are too great but not that famous. Movies chits were also done. two games ready. We were to get the third one ready too, but we thought otherwise. We assumed that the two games would take up all the time that we had (6-8).
Vijay and Nishant recruited a force to get the decorations in place on Tuesday night. They were here till 11, but no one spotted the clues we had hidden :) (rather the next day even Vinaya could not find the clues we had hidden :P)

Now on the "D" day, we arrive in office normal time. The whole office is decorated wonderfully. Diyas, lanterns colour all around. Got us in the festive mood instantly :)

Vinaya and me decide that we should atleast get the third game ready just in case we have time and energy for more games. We decide on the link game, where you try to find a relation and form a group. The biggest group wins. We had colleagues names wriiten for round one and cards for second round. This we completed by 4pm (on the day !)

It was 5pm, everyone excited and up for snacks. I guess the real suspense was in finding out what all the names meant, Treasure Hunt, Linked in, Dumb C++ (not to forget also what was inside the gift they won after so much hard work and toil :P). But snacks were not there. So we started games instead by 5:30. Treasure hunt took less time than expected. And the worse clue was Denmark! There were atleast 3 teams stuck at the same clue at the same time! And then as usual Vinaya was doing her rounds of helping people move on :) I remember people's interpretations of बेहरा...and explaining it to the person, the clue leads to..nice :)

This is the team that won!

After treasure hunt, everyone was tired and hungry :) They were refreshed with hot hot "madan" bhaiyya made bhajjis :) I hope they were yummy.

We were not sure how willing people would be for the next game, but there was even more fervour for the next game. We distributed chits and asked them to form links. The chits had names of employees. There were only sixteen in one round but the terrace was a bhaji market...or maybe a stock market. Everyone was trying their best to get people into one group, with some valid relation. What if we had 40 names?

We also let the runners-up choose their gift. Why? Since we didn't want to be blamed for them making the choice :P

And the winners, proud of their victory. This is the chashma group :D

This is the married group :)

Since, this was a hit we played the same game with the same set of chits with the next sixteen people. We never got out the card-chits. After this we moved on to dumb C++.
This game was a fun ride. Teams enacting, people around creating confusion, the atmosphere was electric! The competing teams had another competition going around "humne haraya" competition. This was, who creates more chaos and helps the other teams lose :D
Some nice acting moments are here

                                                                Transformers

                                                    Slumdog Millionaire

                                                              Ice Age

                                                 

                                                                Home Alone

                                                                Terminator

                                                               Tere Bin Laden

And here is the winning team

Thus ended the games. After which was nice yummy food, thanks to VijayG and Nishant.
Cheers, to many more such fun-enthusiasm-filled days :)

                                                     

P.S. I forgot to mention the mistake we made this time. Remeber me mentioning that we jotted down the movie names for DumbC++? We jotted them down on the board in Nasdaq. We forgot to erase them once we were done. And next day, Lalit had a meeting there for which he cleared the board, before which he noted all of them down :D Smart fella I say! So, we had to think of other movies to give his team who had already formulated plans for each and every movie on the list! Hopefully we don't make a mistake the next time!

For a one sided affair on dumbC++ check Mohsin's post here. For more inside news, on the treasure hunt, check Vinaya's post here.