What is this world coming to? I mean seriously what is this world coming to? You don’t know? Well neither do I but I have a feeling its not something good. The ominous signs are all around. Things that shouldn’t be happening are happening! Both the rum bottles bought from Goa are….still not opened. My bank balance is in 2 digits. P******m found out I was coming to work to just blog and now I am dead and buried under work. I am going home for few days. The world might just be coming to an end.

So before it does, I would like to finish the Goa mini-series so that all you people who have been waiting patiently, impatiently and threateningly for it aren’t left behind as wandering ghosts seeking fulfillment. So last you heard, I had successfully managed to survive yet another day in the boot camp thanks to my amazing survival instincts and skills. I had won the day! Yay! But the night was still to go. Crap! And in the darkest hours of the night the unleashed two attacks on us.

The first was called Business Roman. I didn’t get it. We had no clients from Rome so WTF was this? It was yet another case of a classic disability that all the management people suffer from. Its called misnomeritis. They just cant give anything a sensible name! The Business Roman had nothing to do with Romans nor was it was any of my Business. Basically they gave us a bunch of bamboo sticks, a spool of thread, 4 rubber bands, a square piece of cloth with a hole punched in every corner and a rubber ball. Oh and a piece of paper with more rules and regulations than the SEBI handbook. The point system was so complex that Ramanujan could have written a thesis on it. Of course I understood every bit of it and I have dumbed it down so you all can understand it.

Basically we had to play around with the ingredients till magically a catapult got created out of the blue and flung the ball far enough to get us some points. Points depended upon how long you took, how many people it took, how much stuff you used and how long the ball traveled. Already my team was communicationally challenged as the captain was a P*******er from China and half the instructions given to her got lost in translation and other half got lost when she conveyed them to us.

Luckily our vice-captain thought he knew what he was doing and he took control. Four of us decided to built the catapult and the other four, including the captain, were benched. We had 40 minutes to build it and we kept getting it wrong again and again and again. Finally when he had something that looked like a catapult ready I realized that the vice-captain had *did not* know what he was doing. Drawing upon my immense knowledge of Physics, Geometry, Trigonometry and Rocket Science I concluded that this was less of a catapult and more of a self destructing pile of bamboo shit. It wouldn’t work. Hell a dead body could chuck the ball further away than this travesty. So going by the position of stars, the tide timings for the day and the temperature of the air in Santa Barbara, I suggested certain changes in the design to ensure optimum projectile hurlation.

Running out of time, we couldn’t implement those ground breaking, cutting edge, out-of-this-world suggestions properly and had to quit half way through. All set to test this machine, a pure marvel of human intelligence and raw, brute power of rubber bands, we stretched the rubber bands and placed the ball just perfectly in the cloth and waited with abated breath to launch it in to the distant horizon. My vice-captain released the trigger and ……. PLOP! The ball dropped FOUR INCHES away and rolled away in disgust. WTF!

This sucked serious you-know-what! While other teams were jumping around their catapult screaming 14 feet, 20 feet 100 miles and what not, we quietly huddled around our “whatabull” acting as if that attempt never happened. Sadly we were so confident of creating a world record on the first attempt that we had used up all out resource and just enough string left to have one more shot at it. We quickly and quietly glanced in the general direction of the catapults that were doing well, not taking any note of designs and stuff of course as that would be copying. We had no time to change modify anything so we just pushed the trigger as far back as we could for our one last try. With tension mounting, we needed to clear 10 feet to get any points, we all waited for the last attempt that would seal our fate.

3……2…….1……and off it went! Ok not really but yes this time it actually stayed in air for more than few milliseconds and landed few feet away. By no measuring standards was it anywhere near the 10 feet mark but some pushing, shoving and prodding, all while no one was looking, helped it cross 11.4 feet! Yay! We did it. Ok so what we didn’t come first but at least we got something out of it!

Damn this is getting long. Need to end it here. I may or may not cover the Team Entertainment or rather Team Enterpainment as I don’t remember a lot and there is still so much to write about Goa! So what do you guys say? Is it getting too boring and too detaily and I should just condense rest of Goa in one post or keep writing? You are also missing out on all that has been happening since Goa! Chances are I will forget all that soon. Like the Crucible, Life at P******m, the gym, oh wait which reminds me that a guy at gym asked me if I was a fan of Baba Ramdev. *Note to self* It’s time to trim beard before that trip to airport.

On another hand I was asked to make a moodboard by Sree and Still. Well I didn’t know what to make so I did the best thing I could do for all you, I made it about myself!

From collage