There are times when you are happy. Lots of times.
And there are Scientifica type times. Rare ones.
From it's humble beginnings to it's magnificent end, Scientifica has been an enthralling ride. I've always maintained that to understand, respect and come to love people, you have to work with them under pressure. I can only say that in the past few months I've forged relationships that I know I will never forget. From managing to tolerate people whom I would generally *biff* on the nose to spending quality time working with people I care about to getting to know people and becoming good friends, I've done it all through the Scientifica journey.
When Scientifica first took on its inter school avatar, I was (as usual) in the cyber lab. I came out to see a huddle around JSR babbling excitedly. On reaching there I found out the reason behind the excitement and quickly joined in with glee. Then followed gazillions of conversations with Shantha Ma’am and other teachers…
Suddenly we found ourselves saddled with a wondrous burden. The task of figuring out what events we were to have, what they were to entail, who would take charge, how to ensure that we rub everyone the right way, it was all tough and amazingly frustrating at times. But, now, I can confidently tackle people and listen to the biggest cart load of bull crap and act as though I think they are amazing to be saying what they are. That, trust me, is an art.
But the weirdest was yet to happen. The design days. I have NO idea how Ruchika and I ended up working together. No clue whatsoever. Now, a person with whom my communication extended to a “Hi!” and “What’s up?” was my full time online buddy. Somehow we did end up working together, and I think the results speak for themselves. I need to go into detail here simply because it’s worth it. Someday, years and years hence, I’ll look back at this blog and realise what an amazing experience it was. Right from the start we knew that we’d have to fight and we were willing to do it. One goal: It’s our last ever school fest. There will be NO A4 sheet saying “National Public School, Indiranagar, cordially invites you to…” There will be no plain white certificates with weird borders. We will design stuff and they will accept it. No pale green patterns, no boring pixellated pictures. So we began. We made a hot black shirt, a nice black certificate and started on a black invite. Then they deigned to inform us that black is “inauspicious” and that designs that had previously been accepted would now have to be changed. Then we redesigned the certificate to a blue one in 15 minutes (stroke of genius, even if I say so myself) and began redesigning the brochure and shirt. So we designed a complete dark (without much black) invite. Then we were told that it must go too as dark stuff is “sinister”. Somewhere then, while Ruchika and I were (in righteous indignation) yelling about stupid rules, Akash decided that they could do without me. So I strode off with the hard disk and in about 30 seconds it hit me that how much ever I threaten to ditch this effort, I won’t be able to it. For one, I’d got used to Ruch’s company and I was not about to sever paths when we were becoming good friends and, secondly, it meant way too much for me. It was my chance to do something for the school and more importantly, for a batch of students who, without even the slightest sign of discomfort, had included me in their ranks and treated me as one who has known them since they were in their nappies. So I couldn’t walk out on it. I fumed, yelled, threatened and stuck on. Ruch can be quoted saying “ninny is moving between angry and very angry”… it’s true. Despite that, I had to help. Call it an OCD if you wish, I wanted to be part of the difference (actually, be 50% of the difference)… right from the start, ruch and I formed a complementary pair. What she was good at in Photoshop, I couldn’t do to save my life and I could carry out, neatly, work that she wasn’t comfortable with. So, on being informed that dark is out, we began with a white based invite. Our first reaction was mutinous. “What the hell, we’ll show them, we can do it in white!!!” we said. Then, “Shit, the white does look good ya!”… not bad. Lets do it awesomely and make sure that they have no issues with it… So we did it. Completed it. Then we were told that it won’t be printed and that we either just flush our work down a loo or we print it ourselves. Three guesses as to what we chose! We bought paper and got it cut, made a stationery store friend, and tried printing. We got a black sheet. And then Mugs took over. If it weren’t for her, I don’t know what we’d have done for the invites. That evening ruch and I spent in misery wondering if all our work was actually going to go waste, but a message from mugs read “v found a way 2 print ur invites” and it was oddly comforting. Next morning, “You finish the invites; we’ll get it printed outside.” Oh My God. Mugs = God.
We had innumerable incarcerations with teachers, got belted for the most inconsequential things, never heard a word of praise, were treated like something smelly that got under their squeaky clean shoes and got what we had desperately wanted. The envelopes happened the way I wanted them to (yes, I derive much joy out of that) and suddenly, the shirts were our design too…
The “design days” were a melee of emotion; a saga of accomplishment, defeat, angst, bureaucracy, joy and epiphanies – one of the most fulfilling periods of my schooling. We camped in the lab, swore under our breaths, cracked silly jokes, bonded with moturam, bunked meals and had a blast. I love you ruch =D and both of us (I’m sure) are really really grateful to mugs for standing by us for that turbulent time.
Phone calls. For a while, if you needed to find either Dipstick or me, you’d look in the reception. Calling up schools, we thought, might be fun. It wasn’t. It was annoying and disheartening. To be polite to people who clearly don’t give a rat’s ass about your effort and emotions is difficult. We’ve both mastered the art. After today, all I can say is that those who turned down our invitation just missed out on a lot of fun. Their loss, really.
Cyberia. This was a team where I “knew” only some two people – Kz and Vidya. The rest were mainly alien to me. Thrown together out of a genuine love for computers, we found that despite all our differences, we made a good team. Each of us had our own special strengths and I believe that this is the very reason why our event had such variety. The couple of days before Scientifica, when we literally resided in the lab, were amazing. I am ashamed of the fact that I did minimal work in comparison to Chad, Vivek, Brrr and Abhilash. Without their aid and effort, my round would have been completely impossible. For that, I’m exceedingly grateful to you guys. Our comp. sci. teachers could not have been more supporting. They practically allowed us to do precisely what we wished to do and helped in any way that they could. That’s simple awesome of them!
18th December, 2009.
I slept at 0230 and woke up at 0330 hours. So much fun. Came to school feeling like a wrung out dish rag in awesome clothes (I can say that, can’t I?)… began with Cyberia work and then realised that my partly done video wasn’t working. So I changed stuff and got it functional. Everyone else handled Cyberia (again, I was a useless lump of lard sitting there doing nothing related to my event). Honestly, nothing that I did today would have worked out without help from gazillions of people. Nikhil for the laptop (without which there would be no video), my Cyberia team for handling the whole thing so magnificently. I was so mortified that I wasn’t even there when the judges for my round came in but none of them (even once) mentioned how they were doing work that I was supposed to handle... That, I guess, is why any team event is special. Also, I must thank Cee, Mansi and Surbhi for the tonnes of pictures that they ran all around and took. There was NO way in hell that I could’ve finished the video in time if I had to do all that work myself. Neither did they complain, ever. Running around and seeing a bit of all events was fun. However, compiling that video was scary. Simply because I had no feedback and I was relying on my judgment alone, which has often been proven to be rather unconventional and weird. Also, I was afraid that something would go wrong. It did. Damn those blasted speakers to hell. I must, however, thank all those people who clapped and cheered when it got over. It meant quite a lot to me. Then Bindu Ma’am came up to speak. And waved the invites around... I think that made up for every single insult or scolding we received for attempting to be different. The cheer we got, the fact that she publicly acknowledged our effort - it made ruch’s and my day. Then, of course, the fact that we heard two different schools say that Scientifica was the best fest they’d been to the whole year through. If anything, it sealed in the joy and feeling of achievement. Random pictures, one with hedge and ruch, corner house, plonked on the ground, sitting on the stairs and blowing bubbles… they went into making one of the best days of my life, so far.
Ruch, Dipstick, Hedge and the rest of the awesomest batch on the planet – it has been a pleasure and an honour working with you!
