“Tap”ping the door of the past

Tap .. Tap.. Tap.. the water drips out of the tap.

I stare at it silently.

Tap.. Tap .. Tap… the water continues to drip out.

I stare at it. And then try to rotate the handle so that the noise drowns out.

Tap .. Tap.. Tap… the water persistently drips again.

I look at it and then feel an overwhelming anger . Why does it keep dripping even though I try so hard to make it stop ?!

Tap.. Tap.. Tap..

And that’s it, I lose it.

But just before I almost yell at that infuriating tap …a question comes to mind ..Why does that tap remind me of ME ?

Its been almost ten months since my last post and a lot has happened in the last one year. Professionally, I got acquainted with a possible career option and developed new areas of interest. Personally, I grew as a person as I gained some friends and lost so many more.

As a student in my third year studying Computer Science in a competitive institution, I feel that we learn about pressure very swiftly and early in life. I turned 22 yesterday, but mentally I feel 45. Ofcourse, physically I look 15, but thats a whole new different ball game 😛

Many questions force their way in the face of students our age today. Research or Job ? Natural Language Processing or Computational Biology ? Friendship or Love ? Fling or Long Distance ? GATE or GRE ?

If you were lucky to have answered one of these questions, dont worry these questions are like a tennis ball launcher, the moment you hit one you can see the other one coming right at you. As if having so many questions to answer and such less time at hand was not a problem, we are surrounded by people competing against us directly or indirectly.

When so many thoughts and emotions are a daily part of our life, we as humans become very much like a simple household tap. Usually it flows peacefully but when sediments build over time, this tap gets clogged and refuses to stop dripping. What is the best way to set our emotional tap free ?

Let it go. Let it OUT.

Some people eat a lot, gym a lot, listen to music… Writing in my opinion, is the best way to free myself from thoughts that plague me. The last year was one of the most influential years of my life. It was an emotional rollercoaster. I was always the bookish introverted girl who never went down to play with the other kids in the apartment. I had lived my entire life with my parents and done exactly what they asked and never experienced what living on my own might feel like. I might even say that even though I was 21, I was as immature as a 17 year old. But then I got the Indian Academy of Sciences Research Fellowship and…. Ropar happened.

Ropar in Punjab, is a beautiful serene place with a very pleasant temperature. I left my city home and landed alone in Punjab, faced with a rural beauty that I had never seen before. The roads were planned and the air was so fresh. I opened my eyes and I could not stop taking it all in. When I reached my Girls hostel on Campus, my first thought was disgust. Oh My God ! It was a barebone room with no AC and it was 42 degrees outside ! But soon as I looked around in the rural market where they wove my mattress, I realised this was going to be my home for the next two months. I walked into my room and started setting it up and I felt emotional, as this was the first time I was doing everything all alone. And unnaturally, I enjoyed it. Turns out Im obsessively neurotic about cleanliness, something that my room mates endlessly tease me about and something my mother just cannot believe. 😛

When I had gone to Ropar, I had done some barebone projects based on Natural Language Processing. In my college we called these projects research projects, but three weeks into my stay at IIT, Ropar I began to realise I had not even covered the R in Research. We worked all day and sometimes late into the night and I began to enjoy it. There’s something about being with like minded people, it brings joy to the most dull things. I still remember pushing my clothes in the washing machine as my roomate and I discussed the daily news. I remember kickboxing late at 8:30 PM and coming home drenched in sweat and freaking out over a cockroach in the bathroom 😛

I remember sitting in the middle of the lawn staring at constellations and playing with the early morning dew. There were no fancy shops to have fancy junk food. I had a lemon with cucumbers everyday in the mess. And when I was feeling excited, I would squeeze the lemon and make myself some cold lemon juice. Something about those birds singing in the morning as you drink your cinnamon flavoured “chai” makes the peace come out in you.

Punjab deeply changed me. I began to see the need for learning new things. I began to feel the need to spend time with ME. When I left for Ropar, I was hyper and emotional. I was concerned with petty fights. I had best friends back home in Bangalore, who I felt were drifting away from me. But when I came back from Punjab, somehow everything stopped mattering. I felt the need to be within myself and understand the chaos within me. And slowly the people who did not align with me faded away into their own hemispheres. Occasionally I felt rather alone, Why is it that I did not fit among the crowd, an annoying voice nagged me ? Why did he/she desert me ?

But the clouds cleared out and I found my silver lining. I had left Bangalore with a sense of inferiority, like I cannot be good enough to stand at par with my peers. But now I could sense in myself a growing sense of confidence. Since I felt alone, I fought to survive and with that I started to feel like I can be alone and I can be happy. Peer Pressure is a very much present phenomenon and the people who feel it intensely are most often the ones who value themselves very critically and want to achieve success.

“If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.” 

If at any point of your life you feel that you have achieved all your goals and there is nobody around you that you would much rather be like, then you know its time to move. Ambition and Competition are requirements for success and we should tackle our competitions with the right spirit.

There would always be naysayers who mock your progress and say that you are no where as great as you see yourself as. But sometimes you have got to look beyond the stings. It is not possible to never feel hurt by what people say about you, but like chicken pox, it infects you, scars you and then you will hopefully never be infected by it again. The hardest part is to do something that nobody expects you to do. But, I believe If you feel that you are with the wrong person or with the wrong friends and you know this for sure in your heart, then you should take the choice and move ahead with the people you think suit you, no matter what your friends say. Life is too short to fill it with regrets and to always conform to the rules.

Sometimes we just have to take the risk. Its cheesy as hell but I believe the heart guides you better than bare rationale. The choice may be something scary like revealing your feelings towards someone or even trying an adventure sport. At this point the simplest way to make your choice is asking yourself this question : “Ten years from today, Am I going to look back and wonder.. What if ?”. If your answer is yes, then I think you should take that shot. Life is so complicated, its not worth it to burden ourselves with thoughts like “I wanted to do that but I didn’t as she told me not to/ I wonder what they would have said”. It simply does not matter. If they had to say it, they would say it someday anyway.

The questions will always keep coming at you. But today I learnt a valuable lession in Software Engineering Class :

“Adapting with the Change is far more preferable than creating a new plan”.

Plans will come and go, but its essential to be open to the change. Yeah, sometimes the change we try to accept in our life in often painful. Whether its ending a long term relationship, or moving to a completely new research interest...the rush that comes from winning the challenge is worth it. 🙂

Cutting Free From the Crabs

One time a man was walking along the beach and saw another man fishing in the surf with a bait bucket beside him. As he drew closer, he saw that the bait bucket had no lid and had live crabs inside.

“Why don’t you cover your bait bucket so the crabs won’t escape?” he said.

“You don’t understand.” the man replied, “If there is one crab in the bucket it would surely crawl out very quickly. However, when there are many crabs in the bucket, if one tries to crawl up the side, the others grab hold of it and pull it back down so that it will share the same fate as the rest of them.”

So it is with people. If one tries to do something different, get better grades, better jobs, improve themselves, escape their environment, or dream big dreams, other people will try to drag them back down to share their fate. 

Moral of the story: Ignore the crabs. Charge ahead and do what is right for you. It may not be easy and you may not succeed as much as you like, but you will NEVER share the same fate as those never try.

 

This is not a monologue about how I feel the world is conspiring to bring you down. 😛 (Of course sometimes when I am melodramatic, I do feel that :P)

As a student and a young adult, I find myself privy to many kinds of opinions that the world has to offer.

People have opinions on everything. Whether it’s how you score? How you dress? How you look or how you speak. Honestly speaking I would be lying outright if I said these opinions never matter to me. They matter and once upon a time they mattered more than they should have.

At these moments when I hear the opinions that other people have of me, I feel hurt. Sometimes I feel the need to defend myself. Sometimes I feel angry and violent. But then I realize ..

Do they know the whole story?

Does anyone in fact ?

I am a firm believer in the fact that subconsciously we all know what we really want and what we don’t. We could have the best friends or the best parents in the world and yet feel deeply alone. No,that does not make you depressive or selfish. It just means that subconsciously you don’t meet the standards that you have set for yourself.

It doesn’t matter how close you are to your parents, your friends or your boyfriend. No one will achieve that level of intimacy that you have with yourself.

Therefore, you ask yourself.

Why is it that I am not happy?

Why is it that everyone seems to think I have a perfect Life but I don’t think so?

And you’ll realize that you are not satisfied about some flaws that you have. Now note, these flaws need not be horribly obvious (like maybe you’re a chronic drunk or something) It can be something as simple as feeling that you are not suited for the subject that you’re studying. It can be feeling like you can’t communicate effectively even though the world thinks you have pretty good language skills.You can have a perfect BMI but yet want a better body!

And the sad part is IF you ever spoke these fears out aloud. People would only laugh 😛

Take it from me, I have a perfectly normal BMI. Yet when I expressed the need to lose weight my friends said “Why? You don’t even need it! Are you trying to become a model?” My own mother said the same. Of course the real reason wasn’t the body at all. I am trying to improve my stamina so I can work better and feel more active! Who will explain this to the world without the constant debate over all your reasons? :O

Similarly when I joined Toastmasters to improve my speaking skills a lot of people debated my move. They didn’t get it. I could write fine and speak normally according to them, what is the need for this waste of time, they said.

The point is that, no one knows your reasons better than yourself.

YOU know what makes you uncomfortable. YOU know what makes you feel like you are not at par with the rest. So when people question your choices and your decisions, ask yourself. Do they know why I made the choice? Can they possibly be familiar with everything that crossed my mind? The answer would be NO.

You can feel like someone is supposed to support you through your struggles and be your person, but instead of being disappointed that they couldn’t empathize with you,what you can do,is realise that you still have yourself. And you will ALWAYS pull YOURSELF up whether anyone else does or not.

I believe that Self-improvement is a very very personal process.

No one really knows how Steve Jobs felt when he was just a dropout from College. Day after Day he worked on himself, ignored the other opinions and one day he was a success. The same world which probably spoke against him when he was growing now spoke FOR him.

Everyone has flaws. What’s most important is to understand them, acknowledge them, and address them.

Are you someone who likes to grow? Do you constantly seek to improve yourself and become better?

It is through improving ourselves that we get the most out of life.

Today I have completed 1 year of Toastmasters and I feel like I can speak more confidently to a group of people I do not know. Only you can be familiar with the anxiety you experience when you face the unknown. And the way you choose to armour yourself doesn’t require any sort of explanation to anyone.

I have been working on my fitness for a month now and I feel active. It may not seem big to anyone but to me it’s HUGE. I have NEVER woken up at 5 in the morning in the last 21 years of my life or followed any kind of food regime.To me,holding back on eating what I want,requires serious effort.

So Not only am I more fit now, I am also a little step closer to being as disciplined as I would like to be.

The smallest morsel of success acts like a catalyst and builds your success curve. It’s like chemistry, when they add a small seed to speed up the process.

So basically all you have to do, is seed yourself.

DON’T be afraid to try the new.

Remember that Amateurs built the Ark, Professionals built the titanic.

If you feel not good enough, Make sure you charge right ahead and face that elephant in the room, no matter if anyone thinks you can or not.

The worst enemy you can have is Low self esteem and that can go only if you hack at it a little by little every day 🙂

 

Installation Ceremony at Sunshine Toastmasters : My experience

Toastmasters is an Organization famous for its motto: “Where leaders are made”.

Keeping up with this motto, The fourth of January was a very special day for Sunshine Toastmasters Club as it was the installation and induction ceremony for the term Jan- May 2015.It was quite a happy coincidence that the event fell so close to New Year, maybe a good omen even.

So it was not surprising when the Theme of the event was the strange ways that people celebrated New Year’s!

Did you know that In Russia, they write down their wish on piece of paper, burn it and throw it into their champagne glass and drink it at Midnight? I don’t know about what joys it can guarantee but it sure guarantees FOOD poisoning 😮

And in Netherlands they eat Oliebollen (big oily balls of dough which are deep fried and covered in icing sugar).This is supposed to welcome new year ( along with new layers of fat on your body).

The Venezuelans wear Yellow Underwear on this day, which signifies good luck.  Well It sure brought John Abrahams backside a lot of good luck in dostana :p

                

Yes, everyone seems to think of an installation ceremony as a solemn pious event, but at Sunshine Toastmasters we deal with even the most solemn occurrences with a sunshine like smile on our faces!

As if to emphasize just that, the event swung open with the joyous smile of the very talented artist-teacher Shivani who played the role of Sergeant in Arms with her usual ease.

There was a beautiful song just following that by our very own group of patriotic rockstars (one of the singers was our very own Lalitha ma’am’s son).

The evening then formally began with the Master of ceremony for the evening (ahem, that’s yours truly). Having never publicly conducted a meeting before (especially not one of this much magnitude) I was quite nervous. There were many high dignitaries present there and I really didn’t know what it would be like to speak to them or about them.

My fears were put to rest when Geetha Prasanna (past division B governor) came onto the stage to perform the induction ceremony. IF one has to play a leader without playing a bad cop this elegant woman does it best! It was clear when she spoke that she has the ability to blow your mind with the shortest of conversations. Following her was IPDG Kumaran. He looks tall and handsome, but nothing can compare the humility with which he speaks. He gave a clear perspective about what the entire point of the Toastmasters Initiative was.

Past President Anand came and radiated sunshine on our club as he always does with his ever-present smile and handed out the certificates of achievements at the club.

Area governor Mrinalini, performed the otherwise long induction ceremony with her trademark perfection and simplicity. And the new Team was welcomed with a joyous applause 😀

“For Last year’s Words belong to Last year’s language, Next year’s Words await another voice“ – Said Elliot.

There was a huge round of applause when newly anointed president Priyanka walked in to give her speech. She brought with her boundless energy and joy and once again rejuvenated the mood of the evening with an inspiring speech. Priyanka, is a very creative enthusiastic person and it’s my personal opinion that the club will achieve new hallmarks under her leadership (and most of the guest speakers enthusiastically agreed with my opinion in their speeches making Priyanka almost burst with happiness: P)

Many dignitaries spoke on this day, Toastmasters Gauri, Ramesh, etc. but one thing that I noted and was very grateful for was the spirit of the Toastmaster community. There were very few not so obvious glitches but everyone just jumped right in to help me conduct the ceremony and many people didn’t even get to know that something had gone unlike what had been planned!

The entire meeting was so energetic and filled with laughter, not to mention awe (OH! We had a BEAT BOXER at the event!) Yeah, Beat boxer Sunny blew everyone’s mind with his insane skills.

By the end of the meeting, everyone knew everyone. Even my very quiet mother who had come as a guest was happily talking to so many people. I met people from different clubs,different states. People of all ages mixed together happily and talked about their lives.

That’s the effect of Sunshine Toastmasters. People come from everywhere! Whether they are housewives or students like me. Dasas from ISKON or fashion designers. Research Scientists or Builders… It’s a welcoming arena to fine tune the leader in you, with the help of a warm group of people who extend friendship that lasts for a life time  😀

I’m so glad to be a part of it 🙂

The Grey Side Of Me

Too often, the thing you want most is the thing you can’t have. Desire leaves us heartbroken.

It wears us out; It can wreck your life but as tough as wanting something can be, the people who suffer the most are those who don’t know what they want.

– Meredith Grey

 

Being a student and a teenager I find that I strongly empathize with this emotion.

In fact I strongly resonate with almost all the quotes of Grey’s during their intern years, whoever wrote the dialogues did some serious psychological research and I bow down before them 😛

As a child we have a relatively simple life. We eat we Sleep we study and we play. If we do right we are rewarded, If we do wrong we are punished and taught how to do it right. Basically we leave the hard to the “Adults”. We make no decisions. So we go through this stage thinking … When i grow up, I shall think about it.

 

But when you’re a teenager. You’re suddenly forced into thinking things on your own. Suddenly your life is no longer a template provided by your parents. You feel this need to experience it on your own, the need to try out something beyond the template.Some of us feel it later than others. But everyone feels it. This is the transition stage.

The wish to explore the unknown comes with its own set of advantages and disadvantages. You leave yourself open to harm. You are no longer sheltered. You have no experience and you are going into the battlefield with nothing to protect you, except your faith that it will work out and a strength that comes from this faith. This is unnerving and sometimes you can be left with damages that might take a while to recover from.

But then again. Every coin has two sides.

Transition is movement. From one part of life to a whole new one. And it can feel like one long, scary, dark tunnel but you have to come out the other side. Because what’s been waiting there, might be glorious.

And if you stick to that hope that you will meet glory, then one day you just will.

I have always been a risk-taker( My parents aren’t particularly happy about this)

Ever since i was a child i remember having a great affinity to learning new things.I was always the one to try the new dishes, read the new exotic books, be the first to jump off the boat into the lake while rafting. Why ?

Because I like the feel of something new hitting me. Whatever it may be, Whether its the feel of icy cold water hitting me as i jump in, or whether its the taste of something new spreading in my mouth. I love the experience. I am aware i might hate it but i’d like to know what its like anyway.

So yeah I have taken a lot of decisions in my life that i took because i wanted the experience.

One of the biggest decisions of my life was to take a year off and study again for one of the toughest entrance exams in my country. This was a hard choice to make for me. Especially because the options i had weren’t so drastic and would have been the easier way out.All my life I had been on top, a grade A student.Now suddenly I was going to experience how it would be to be the one at the bottom. I was aware that taking this choice would deeply impact me and probably change me forever.

I took the decision for the experience and out of some need to know if i had what it takes. I dont really judge my abilities based on what the results are. I judge based on my take-back from the experience.

I changed.

Formerly i was a happy bubbly girl with no cares in the world. I thought in black and white. Mostly white because i was just so happy all the time.

During my drop, I realised that some things arent as simple as they seem. They say that adversities bring out the worst in a person and they certainly brought out mine. Suddenly i saw myself clearly with all my flaws exposed. I had fallen off my own mental pedestal. And my weaknesses were clearly exposed to me.

I realised how it feels to be behind the people you have been with all your life and try to get up and fight against the weight of all your flaws.Its like quicksand. Sometimes you feel like you can never get out.

I was depressed for a long time and weak for an even longer time. I drew boundaries and distanced myself from my parents, my friends and even from myself. There were some things I just didnt want to see.

But you see…

Boundaries don’t keep other people out, they fence you in. Life is messy, that’s how we were made. So you can waste your life drawing lines or you can live your life crossing them.

But there are some lines that are way too dangerous to cross.

Here’s how I see it, if your willing to take the chance, the view from the other side is spectacular.

One year later, I dont know how. But I was over the dark phase.

The experience was over and I was ready for a new one. Dont get me wrong, I was scarred by it.But these are scars i proudly carry. That one year i spent, I realised what was truly important.

In that one year, I grew from a fickle bouncy child to a slightly mature individual. I realised the need to cut things out of your life if you dont need them. Sometimes even when its hard to cut people out, you have to do it.

I realised my deep desire to do something different in my future. To be more than just a woman in this world.The need to have a career and an ambition.

I realised the need to value my family over everything else because not only is blood thicker than water, these are the only people who are obliged to help you when you’re down 😛

Suddenly I became important to me.In some way I got real ALONE time during my drop. And I realised that its important to love yourself more than anyone else. Because, If you cant love yourself, how can you expect someone else to ? In the end , the best back-up you have is yourself.

I wish i could say that i had got through my dark phase victoriously. It would have been fantastic if i had got through to the top university in the top stream. But this aint no Bollywood movie with a happy ending. I have regrets about that, but one thing i dont regret is taking a drop. I learnt a lot from that one year… I learnt that life is a lot more than just that one goal. IF i lost one doesnt imply i will lose another. The goal just changes, is all.

Today Im a different person. Not the girl who smiles all the time. Im probably dark and twisty. But I like myself that way. I know what i want because of what I lost. And because I know what I want, I can cut out things I dont need.

Sometimes I lose people close to me because of this but now I know that I dont want to settle for anything less than what I was looking for.

No I dont have a life path chartered out, no I dont know if I want to be an entrepreneur, or a research scientist. I just know that I want to be brilliant at what I do. And what I do has to keep reinventing itself and changing because I live life for the experience.

There comes a point in your life when you’re officially an adult. Suddenly you’re old enough to vote, drink and engage in other adult activities. Suddenly people expect you to be responsible, serious, a grown up. We get taller( okay,not me 😛 ) we get older but do we ever really grow up?

In some ways we grow up, we have families, we get married, divorced but for the most part we still have the same problems we had when we were fifteen.

No matter how much we grow taller, grow older, we are still forever stumbling, forever wondering,forever exploring and forever experiencing.

Insider’s Account Of Day 1 At All Girls’ Bizathon

In any classroom in India, you can find that the number of boys is greater than the number of girls.

AT A HACKATHON ?

You will have to Squint to a whole new level to find a woman. Its Like Hoping to see a Polar Bear in the GIR Forest Infact i recently read about the Google I/O Conference, 2014 and how people were pleasantly shocked to find that there were more women.

I had never been to a hackathon. So when My friend told me about the All Girls Bizathon being conducted by NASSCOM 10000 Startups, I felt It was going to be something new.Yeah, i googled a lot about what to expect, but nothing prepared me for what i saw and learnt there.

Once i reached there, i saw around 80 women all huddled together in their respective subgroups (Yeah , Girls do that a lot 😛 ) and i thought to myself “How is this going to work ?” Turns out, the organisers at Jnaapti realized this would happen and as soon as the event started , they grouped us randomly so we were all stuck with people we had never met.

The objective was : “Connect And Communicate with People You have no background with”.

I was in a group with Four other girls. All were Working and almost 5-8 years older than me. I felt uncomfortable. But Then I realized, I am supposed to deal with this and make the most of it . So i Threw my ego aside , and at the risk of looking like an idiot i tried to talk and introduce myself. I realized that all those girls were feeling just as awkward as me, and that making an effort to communicate goes a long way. Within the next 15 minutes We had become Facebook friends and Learnt some fascinating things about each other (One of them was a graduate from IIIT-B and another wanted to be a stand-up comedian though she worked as a developer at Motorola! ). We all had to get up and introduce ourselves to the gathering and WOW were we a diverse collection of women ! There were Scuba Divers And yoga instructors and Social Workers and Techies  :O

I started to feel excited… it would be a day of some whacky ideas.

I wasn’t wrong.

During the “Working Break” We were made to pick chits from a bowl . Whichever topics you get ,we were supposed to come up with a business idea linking those topics.

The objective was : “An idea can Come from ANYTHING “.

For example,Some people got the topics “Birds” and “Restaurant” .. And Then..started the Marathon of the most creative most whacky ideas I’ve heard.

From more charitable ideas like “contributions from the restaurant going to animal welfare organizations” to “pigeons delivering your menu card “ to downright unkind ideas like “choosing which bird you can have for your grill”…. the girls didn’t run out of ideas. It was like suddenly the dam had broken. Every body who had never spoken at a tech meet was now brimming with ideas and laughing happily.

The ice had broken. And Indu Jayaraman came over to give us a talk on business modelling and basics of a startup. There was so much i didn’t know.

This is a basic flowchart of what I as a layman understood from the talk , it may not be accurate to the hilt. But its a hell lot more than i knew before.

This was the best talk of the day i felt, it was interactive to the core. Shy looking women got up and told their own experiences. I loved the story of the wedding planner, she had experiences enough to inspire “Band Baaja Baarat 2 “ :p Many of the participants were getting on in their startups and clarified their doubts about their strategies .It was great , that Indu Ma’am wasn’t the only one answering.Senior professionals in the crowd had their own solutions to give.

We were all given topics and our own Lean Canvas Sheets to get started on the product we would present by the evening. My team was given The strange topic combo of “Bridal Makeup” and “Teaching”. We started brainstorming on ideas and It was hilarious how many ideas could come out of topics so obscure 😛 We named our project MerryME (Its a pun on MarryMe ) and our tagline became “Get hitched without a Glitch”.

The objective was : “Build your own product from a brand new Start-up idea “

Everybody came up with some kickass ideas, and We all went forward and pitched our ideas to the crowd and they voted for whose idea sounded coolest .

Though our most creative member botched up our pitch , we still got votes because she was so funny ,hence We forgave her 😛

It was time to get serious. It was all good to come up with something out of the box. How would it be implemented ? How would it be accepted ? How would it be channeled ? Would it even have a market ? What could be our source of revenue ? Wheres the BUSINESS in our business model ?

It was time to put Indu Jayaraman’s talk into perspective.

By the way all through the event there was a tweetathon going on in the background. Prizes for the best tweet 😛 ( I must admit I’m quite shameless, before this event my last tweet was “hello twitter” in 2013 ,Now suddenly we were tweeting like our lives depending on it XD )

As we started to work on our model , there was another talk by Som Singh on Marketing. And WOW ! She was amazing. I feel pretty Badass now. I know all about B2B models , Go-to-Market strategies, back-linking and Promotion techniques. Wow. Building a product suddenly sounded easier than selling it !!

We had come up with a pretty decent business model and we were really pumped up with the possibilities. We half forgot that it was a hypothetical business actually 😛 One thing that pleased me was that EVERY body in my team spoke up and contributed. Even when we pitched and bragged about our product to Lathika ma’am … every single one of us spoke. I thought to myself. “Five hours back we were complete strangers to each other… Look we are in sync!”.

We recreated our lean canvas models on chart paper and the best five were picked to present. We were one of them *modest cough *.

It was a 5 minute pitch and 1-2 minutes for audience questions. It was exhilarating to present something i had built. Finally the audience polled and It was concluded that noone in the audience WOULDNT use our product :O

I was baffled yet so happy . We WON 😀      

Is this what hacks are supposed to feel like ? I cant believe i missed out on this for so long,just because i was scared :O

It was just day one. Not only had we learnt different strategies and product building . We had also learnt to work as a team and built connections ! I couldn’t wait for the more technical DAY 2 😀