Back to the Ministry

One thing that my friends circle has done is that it has given each other different names. Each one has been assigned a name depending on his characteristics, what he does, his looks etc etc. Lots of criteria.. I hate to say that I am called a Dungar by some of my friends. Another friends group constitutes true Potter fans, thus the names go the Harry Potter way. All of us keep using the Rowling terms very frequently (we all know the terms she has introduced to us). In that group I am known as the “Minister of Magic”, in short “Magix”. Why? Because I am a part of the Ministry i.e. The Technical Committee. Just after the first sessional the Ministry summoned us back to work for another event. This time it was Microsoft (Don’t we all hate them!!). Microsoft organized nationwide Academic Days in 10 cities of India. Their slogan was “Rock With The Gyan”. Although the slogan tells us that the event will be entirely educational, obviously it was not. This event was 20% educational and 80% advertisement of one of their latest product release i.e. Visual Studio 2005. It all started with a couple of persons from an event marketing company approaching us to help them for advertising. I was sitting at the Offline Registration Desk for quite sometime before I was given other jobs like guiding those people to the other institutes in Chandigarh for the advertisement. The advertising and the Offline registration took place only for 2 days before the event. The largest auditorium in Panjab University (The Law Audi) was booked for this event. People from the event management company arrived late in the evening before the day of the event. Extremely professional they were. Within few hours the whole auditorium was set-up with Microsoft posters, projection screens, sound and mike systems. The sound system was too good. 2 small BOSE speakers for the whole auditorium!! Superb effects those two speakers had and they easily covered the entire auditorium. Thanks to the event management company we had almost no work that evening. Just watch them do their job.


The next day the same routine was followed that I have been following every time there is an event. Wake up early morning and reach the event site. A whole team from Microsoft had arrived but unfortunately some of the speakers were missing. Ashwani Sharma was the one who headed the team and some of his speeches were excellent. The first session was for the faculty. There was a session on Microsoft Visual Studio Team Systems. The demonstration was as big a disaster as we have been seeing in the ‘History of Microsoft’ videos. Some of the taskbars of the application just won’t open and there were some other problems. The one who was demonstrating the software started asking for a better Laptop (ironically the one he was using was his own). Finally he took Mr. Ashwani’s laptop but there too he could not successfully demonstrate the software. The second session was for students. I attended another session on Data Mining. The speech part and the presentation were very good but when the demonstration time for SQL server came it was another blunder. It all ended with - “this thing could be done… don’t know what is the problem…”. The rest of the day I was on duty, crowd control, giving away the free software and CDs. The end of the day the faculty was given a 3-DVD set of Visual Studio Team Systems 180-Day Trial. And the students were given Visual Studio Express Edition. Also we were given Tutorial CDs. We as organizers also got free snacks and lunch (and obviously some extra CDs and DVDs).
Abhinav Goyal, one of the members of the Technical Committee was entirely responsible for the success of this event in our institute. He was totally involved with this event throughout.

First time I was able to attend a good birthday - the hostel way. The birthday of one of my good friends, Arvind. We reach his room at exactly 00 hours with a big Black-Forest cake. He was obviously harassed kicked around, and hit mercilessly. Bumps were difficult as he is heavy and big. At night he took all of us to a dhaba at Sec 15 and treated us. The meal was excellent and I also had an eating competition with Rupak (my school class-mate). This competition was planned long before and finally we had a platform for it to materialize. A lachha parantha eating competition which I easily won. But at the same time another friend of mine challenged me to have 5 paranthas for a treat at Mc Donald’s (A non-veg meal). How can I resist the offer. Although I faced some trouble at completing the challenge but I managed to eat enough to convince him to treat me. Now slluuuurrrrp!! I’m ready for another bite at Mc Donald’s.