Kodai kalakkal at Kodaikanal

Last weekend turned to be one of the memorable weekends I ever had. A bunch of funky looking IT geeks joined together to make the team closer, the outing made it as success.

Living in the thick forest of computers and sound of binary algorithm is our lifestyle; we often talk to a lady of assumption, robot chat with no flush but lights and colors a complete virtual flora and fauna.

This time for a change we had to pierce off our work area to look outside the window for a blooming flowers, corkscrew roads, tree covered hills often mistaken for green carpet, freshly brewed air with no emission and the real mountain dew mineral water are few reason for us to feel lost in the heaven.

When we reached the Princess of Hill stations “Kodaikanal”(in Tamil language KOdai means Summer, Kanal means ‘to see’, hence a place to see in summer or a place to visit in summer), she welcome us with the warmth comfort. After firm landing our foot in the kodai hills, we had a short break at the cottage, just to regain the energy lost during the past 12 hours of bus travel.

It was great indeed to be part of the tour; all I had in my mind during the trip is a kind of rhythm reminding me of missing nature linked lifestyle in the urban life.

The Geeks crawled down to the park outside the accommodation to play off the stress inside the soul. We played some games like Volley ball, War of hand towel, Antakshari, Dance, Singing and Individual talent tamasha in the grounds of Chettiar Park, it was filling and we were laughed it off, Noon time we applied brake to the non-stop fun and poured some fuel to our hungry stomach.

Sub twenty temperatures in the middle of hot summer is something we chennaities never experienced but last weekend it was un-usual for many of us. Kodaikanal grabbed all the awards for making us feel hiding inside the blanket in the hot summer.

Camp-fire in the dusk with performance of playmate was great, a few bottles of beer and liquor propelled us even more and the stage was flying out in the air.

Horse riding, boating, shopping and sight seeing what else one can afford to not miss in a single day, we enjoyed them all. The height of the fun to me came when I got a chance to travel in a Jeep in Kodaikanal to visit handmade chocolate bazaar. A short ride with jam packed jeep on the coiled mountain road is a fun for sure trip, we enjoyed it.

The chocolates and spices of mountain are mouth watering and delicious is not enough to describe the yummy taste.

Once again it is a re-test resulted with the same output which says clearly that we stand united after all we were in Team outing right ;-)

Shooting practice

Off late I wanted to start shooting again, since the Nikon/Canon prices have gone up I'm using a Air Rifle to shoot these days :)

I was introduced to the Olympic fame Shooting sports by a friend of mine, in fact I got hooked to the sports after holding the gun he had for a second. Thats where I decided to lay my hands on a air rifle. After couple of search on the internet I found Indian Hume Pipes is a company that produces quality air rifles in India.

The internet is a window to the world, I found all the details to buy the IHP rifle. Sadly I also realized the Chennai based Armory are always on the higher side for the rifles / any weapon. With great regret I spend extra two thousands a premium buying an Air Rifle for my practices.

The rifle I purchased is IHP/National 35 5.5mm(.22) caliber with couple of pellets. the picture as below:

After purchasing I had to find 2 things now, where to practice ? because the Chennai Rifle Club needs and accepts entries only by back door and demanding over a lakh as donation to get admitted. Hmmm this is bad and very sorry state of our state for encouraging sports activities. These people restrict everything as rich people game, if only I have the power to change such things...

I didn't stop my hunger to practice hence I started doing my own target stand to fix the paper target models downloaded from Internet (thanks to google, indiansforgun.com and thegungeek.com). My Do it Yourself preparation of target stand is still half way but I'm very positive and will complete the setup in a day or two.

After landing in the following page, I decided to make myself one target stand.

http://accurateshooter.wordpress.com/20 ... get-stand/

As a first step I bought a 3 meter length FinOlex 50mm (outer dia) 1 1/2" (inner dia)PVC pipe with 4mm thick wall pipe and brought it home.

The 3 meter length pipe got cut into various sizes as mentioned in the above link

20" x 2 end leg pipe
16" x 4 side leg pipe
24" x 2 upright pipe

Other pipe accessories used:
TEE x 2 (1 1/2" size)
Elbow x 4 (1 1/2" size)

Then I started assembling them into the way as explained and got the following half stand,



I wish to slightly modify the top model to make it even more sturdy and easy usable with available materials. Will post picture after I get the top portion completed.

Meanwhile I also gathered few guys to accompany my practice time, hence asked a friend of mine to buy a air gun too. Hurray now we have two and few more from other part of the state. Yesterday we visited a friend's farm in Kancheepuram to try out few tricks that we learned from Internet and yes it was a first successful trip for me in terms of the new sports shooting arena.

We had lots of time in firing plenty of pellets, learned lots of things and of course the team is growing.

Rich man’s dream – Harley Davidson

I had a dream of owning a bike not the one mentioned in title but an Indian freaky idea, the Rajdoot GTS. That dream took almost 22years for me to come to reality. I named my Rajdoot GTS as "china paiyan" which means small boy in Tamil language. Keeping that dream and my small boy aside, I found myself in love with a Fat Boy yesterday but this time I doubt if my dream will come to reality in any point of my life. The simplest reason to state is that the bike which is costlier than all my collection of vehicles, but who cares I can dream right.

Yesterday I got to live few seconds on the Rich Man’s dream the Harley Davidson bike. Man the Harley Davidson Fat Boy model was real stunner and instantly took my attention. What a beauty and what a muscular bike it was? I didn’t think twice to jump on it for a photo pose.

The Fat Boy is equipped with 1600CC V twin engine under the tank; he is real a fat boy.

The stunning chrome parts and full cast alloys were too good; looking at the detailing of stickers on the body, I said to myself, man I should live this dream of a Rich Man. I got to know the price of Fat Boy being 20ish (not thousands but lakhs, may be I should have expressed it like 2million rupees) and half fainted.

Anyway I was assured by my friend who owns this HD and another custom build HD with a similar engine capacity that he will lend his bike for a long ride. Hurray I can now really dream of living ah no no riding richman’s dream.

Farm House

Finally I will have a shelter in my farm to take rest. Yes, last weekend we conducted a bhoomi pooja to built a simple Asbestos cement sheet house in the farm to take rest whenever I visit the farm.
The shelter will also provide room to park as much as 4 of my four wheelers. hmmm good now more vehicles could be purchased.

I basically need place to store my farm outcomes and the equipments. Hence this small house in the farm. Another 20 days we will have house ready in the farm. Hurray Farm House is exciting!

I'm gonna have a small children gymnasium, BBQ facility and personal offroad ground in the farm very soon.

A perfect Gift - Bow

While I was offroading at Jawadhu forest range last week I met a hunter or villager at forest, He had a real bow after a hour long chat with the guy, He turned to me a friend and gifted his Bow to me.

The trip to Jawadhu is always impressing and lots of water in the Bheema Falls, we had good offroad fun too.

On the way back I touched base with my farm at the bottom of the hills and to my surprise the well in my farm was filled with water and near to overflow condition.

1178 kilometer long trip to Kerala

It was excellent experience a 4 day long self driven journey to Kerala state head quarters(Trivandrum) from Tamil nadu state headquarters(Chennai).

I was selling my Yamaha RD350 legendary bike to a keralite as my bike beard the KL number plate. At the same time I promised my friend Shibu that I will handover his Jeep restored by me at his home town. Hence I was in a situation to drive both the vehicles from Chennai to Trivandrum.

There was another purpose on this trip to drop my kids at my hometown hence with the help of my Jeep/RD350 mechanic Bharani I started my longest journey.

The entire trip was covered above 2400kms including return but the 1178kms is the best experience as I was riding the bike or driving the Jeep continually.

Good experience of Bike failures and fix, Jeep thrill and what else met all my good friends one among was Mr.Muthukumar from Coimbatore who restored and possesses huge sum of vintage beauties.

Also met Sajeev, Shinoy and Shibu from Kerala

There was a horrible accident before my eyes in Kerala made my day bit sad as the driver was kill instantly on that incident. It was a Maruti Swift which had to face to fate with road divider and rolled couple of times before landed upside down on the opposite track last lane.

A Team outing for Dummies – Yercaud trip

Preface

For any company or work place with more than 2 employees requires greater amount of co-operation among each other to produce extraordinary outputs. Hence a team with 100+ people and all of them are professionals, hmmm a major reason to look at team building activities as source of people integration technique. There is no patriotic song that we sing together, there is no color that unites us, there is no religion that we share, there are no common skills among us but we all are part of an entity called Team.

Year after year I get an opportunity to bring all the members of our team together to educate the importance of team work.(Task that I always like so much) But who likes advices, suggestions, trainings and commands? I know it is impossible to make every one to listen to someone’s ideas, but there is still a way to achieve the goal – Team Outing. I’m going to write about the last team outing organizing experience that I had here in HCL, We call it Catalyst program (The very first constraint is Budget).

The goals I set myself are

1. Bring all the people together and make them understand they form a entity called Team and every individual is a stake holder.

2. Educate their responsibility while they don't feel like some one is commanding

3. Help them relaxing and reducing their stress

4. Integrate the dis-integrated or hierarchical work team. "Freshers and Senior" barriers needs a break here.

5. Maintain utmost safety while handling the tasks assigned, as each one's security and safety are my priority.

Come on readers join with me for the world of team-building, I'm proud I had done couple of these exercises.

Behind the scenes of Yercaud, the poor man's Ooty trip.

It all started in a weekly meeting that our team had. As it was almost an year since we had our team outing to Jawadhu, everyone wanted to go for an outing.Lots of suggestions for places came; but we had many constraints. As our team do diverse set of technology support for 24/7 support requirements to the clients the major constraint is the Time and operational support. I needed to find any place that is close by Chennai city so our entire team could travel and return with minimal disruptions to the support functionality. I was aiming at no disturbance, I must say we had minimal support staff plan at the very first day of the tour discussion.

Then came my next constraint, money. The moment we think of any tourist location the accommodation cost shot up to sky level. I needed to organize accommodation, food, and travel plan necessary for taking a huge bunch of people (~ 150). I started working on approximate number of headcounts excluding minimal support staffs, people who cannot travel for personal commitments, customer schedules for few guys, last minute drop outs on illness and unplanned events dropouts. So I had a ball back figure of 75~95 guys on the trip plan sheet.Another major concern is that of what kind of entertainment need to be arranged for chunk of people with diverse interests and hobbies while not forgetting “THE MOTTO” of team outing, that is to build a bonding among the team members. Our discussions went on with the team leaders in planning the minimal operational support staff and area of interest for the team visit. Munnar, Pondicherry and Yercaud are the places we rounded off finally. Munnar being far away we need to work on multiple travel mode which led me to strike off Munnar from the list. The Pondicherry plan also was dropped out as there will not be any major difference between Pondicherry and our home city Chennai. Hmmm so the only left out option is the poor man's Ooty that is Yercaud.

I was caught with lots of stress and tension to make the trip a success one, as the total numbers planned was huge and there will be many people with many different expectations. Fulfilling everyone's wishes may not be possible but I wanted to achieve an optimum level of success story. Over all I was looking at every individual for their interest towards the arrangements, except very few in whom I really didn't see any major interest. In fact I was under impression that people are willing to visit as they were compelled by their team leads but I must accept that my assumptions were wrong. I witnessed the trend changing slowly towards the plans after I finalized the place and tentative schedule. The white board in my cabin got filled with list of people who volunteer to participate in the event planned, sooner it was touching 96 number in head count.Looking at the number and overwhelming responses, my tension level was increasing as to find how to make the trip a grand success.

Initial search for lodging in Yercaud posted me a threat on the cost as most of the very good resorts were on the really higher side tariff and I really couldnt afford their tariff for accommodation as my budget for individual is not even half of their quote. I had found 3 places which are still higher but closer to my estimates, that is the day I came to know one of our colleague is in Salem which is the nearest city to Yercaud. I called and requested him to help me visiting Yercaud to see how the three places I spotted are. He returned the call with not so good kind of response. This is not a good sign, but I still had some hope and finally landed in Yercaud International resort's website, the pictures of their cottages were interesting to me. I called the manager Mr.Shanmugam he said accommodation for these many people are going to be a trouble as many of the rooms were already booked. This is a week before my proposed schedule, so I requested him if he can move his guests to another accommodation and block the entire resort for us. He gently agreed and instantly I transferred the advance money through internet banking. I felt bit easy as the accommodation was set.

Parallely I had requested couple of my friends at office to get me quotes from various bus operators for the Yercaud plan, the cost of transport was somewhat close to my estimation and the Just dial (directory)service in Chennai came in first hand help providing me so many number of contacts from different bus operators. The Wheels Tours and Travels company agreed to take up our tour requirement and another fund transfer over the internet, second story of success in the team outing plan.We had still few issues on fixing the start time and return time so the order process of food was put on hold. But I had communicated the resort guys that I will confirm number of meals and people a day before our travel plan.

Since I was given a responsibility to organize a tour for a huge team of professionals; the travel comfort, hygiene food, neat accommodation, hospitality, water, alcohol plans, medical kits, sight seeing options and fun activities were all in queue to be worked out. I had already started working on individual items and started sending all my findings and ideas on email to all the stake holders of the proposed tour plan. Slowly the plans were on progress and the check list I prepared earlier growing on a satisfactory level.

I have tried my level best to include as many people as possible so that issues with single handed failures could be avoided. There were freshers in our team, my solid ideas to include them into the activities worked really good their involvement was phenomenal level and hats off to them.