Hi :),
27th November, 2005. 11:32 PM. IIM-A Confluence finally ended after 3 days of immense and helter-skelter activity. And, so is over a responsibility, a beeg one at that :).
Confluence, the IIM-A B-school fest, is a combination of talks, workshops, and Competitions where over a 1000 students turn up to mingle, interact and compete.
Apart from the talks and the workshops, the events this time were organized under four heads, and I with a friend of mine had been selected approximately half a year ago to organize one of the sessions. As per the organization of our session "Innovations on the Horizon", we had decided to hold a case contest and an Interactive Game. We had also selected a team of 4 PGP1's as part of Team Innovations.
Months had flown by and November was onto us. And guess wat, we had not even drawn up a case, forget the game. Then, amidst huge chaos, we managed to come up with a case written by us under the guidance of one of the foremost Finance Profs. in IIMA, Prof. JR Varma. By 5th November the case had been released, and we had started working on the game. The case was very well-received and we got nice feedbacks, for a work which was essentially done in 1 day !!
The game was to be our bane. We did not want to do a done-to-death format of having small caselets / quiz kind of contests which every other comptt. has. And, we also wanted to have a pairwise Grand Slam kind of event, which would make it that much more exciting. But, the key to this was to come up with something totally objective in nature, so that the teams had no issues with the judgement, and the game could proceed smoothly.
By 20th November, the Case Contest Prelim results had been declared and 6 teams had been selected to come down to IIM-A and present their case solutions before Prof. Varma. The game was still helter-skelter with random thoughts going around in circles. Then on Nov. 21st, we had an epiphany and we managed to freeze the first round of our competition.We wanted the teams to come up with a structure of mazes using paper and cardboards, so that a marble when dropped onto the structure would take the maximum amount of time to come out of it. It was deceptively simple but brilliant in the sense that it could be objectively judged and also gave ample scope to teams to experiment and innovate. From this round we wanted to select 64 teams which would go onto pairwise play a game of chess so that they formed 3 new rules of their own, agreeable to both the teams and then had a rapid-fire round of 15 minutes. We would get 32 teams out of this round, whom we would give an Audio-Visual quiz on Innovations and get 8 teams out of the fray. Then, we would have pairwise presentations on a caselet given to the teams then and there, from which four teams would be ranked 1-4 based on another case presentation in the final round.
Then Nov. 24 dawned, and Confluence was onto us. The Show had started. And, still there was no quiz, no caselets for presentations and all logistical issues to be put in place. Our case contest presentation was scheduled for the 26th and the game was due the next day [Do you see the pattern of chaos which rules my life :D ?] But, as always happens, not to worry :). By 24th, we had finished our caselets [essentially 3 hrs. of work] and quiz qns. were rolling on their way. 26th came, and the Case contest went off wonderfully well, with all participants awed by Prof. Varma's insights as well as feedback on their presentations, and my hopes began to soar. On 26th evening, we also distributed our Game Prelims [i.e. the structure one]'s material and approximately 80 teams registered. But, then something very bad happened. Some teams started to utilize the technicality of the rules to come up with structures which defeated the very spirit of the game. The debates went on till 2 AM, and for some moments it totally shook me, as to the extent people would go to win, it is simply so dispiriting. Anyways, I personally stayed up till 4:30 AM yesterday nite to make sure we had all documents in place for the Game, which was due to start at 830 AM. I was up by 630 AM today, and was taking print outs of all documents by 7 AM, and the whole team was pitching in. By 8, we were on time, and then the teams started coming in, with their awesomm structures. We had a team from China, which came up with a brilliantly-simple and amazing structure. They introduced a channel on a cardboard using two straws, then put fevicol in the channel and then set the marble rolling over the fevicol. This ensured that the marble rolled at an extremely slow speed, but kept moving. Brilliant [Incidentally, this team was ranked overall #1 in Confluence 2005, on the basis of their overall performance, and from what I saw, they totally deserved it :)]. This round went off extremely smoothly, and this was the sign for me, that nothing could go wrong nomore :). Since, only 40 teams had turned up in Prelims, we scrapped the Quiz, and went directly for chess, which was again wonderfully done :). For the presentations we managed to get international judges of all things :D, Mr. Hoekstra, CEO, Philips Innovation Campus, India and Mr. Nuremberger, Worldwide CFO, Siemens. And the participants were really happy with the way things went and by 1 PM, we were finished. For some moments, it din't sink in. A totally hopeless situation of 3 days ago, had been turned around into something so splendid and enterprising, it was so-so satisfying :).
Finally, this beegest B-fest in IIM-A evver, which hosted luminaries like the Ambanis, Vijay Mallya, Arun Shourie, Deepak Parekh, Chandrababu Naidu, signed off today, with Bizquizitive hosted by our very own alumnus, Harsha Bhogle. This has been an experience of a lifetime. Though I missed participating in the fest itself, but then, u take some, and give some :).
All of U take care of urself..and remember...Never say Nevvah again :D.
Adios,
Ranjan
P.S. To end with, lines from a song, I never find anything less than beautiful [from Jhankaar Beats, by the inimitable KK :)]
~~~Tu Hai Aasmaan mein,
Teri Yeh Zameen Hai,
Tu joh hai toh sab kuchh hai, naa koi kami hai,
Tu hi Dil hai, tu hi Jaan bhi hai...
...Teri Chahat Zindagi hai,
Tu Mohabbat, Tu Aashiqui Hai~~~
Par Compare :).
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