I know you all have been waiting for this second part to come up since forever. But I have been busy lately. Mainly getting drunk, singing while drunk and getting caught in the crossfire of a cake fight in office, thanks to which my hair smells like chocolate right now! I will get in to details of all that after I am done with Goa.

So as you all read, or asked someone literate to read out to you, we reached Goa in the wee hours of Tuesday by a damn decent train ironically called Gareeb Rath. We got down at some fuck-if-i-know station where we were packed in to many vehicles of assorted shapes and sizes and we were off to Baga.

We reached the concentration camp, I mean the hotel, at 5:30 and were told to report for the breakfast at 7:30 sharp. Well we had been divided in to 12 teams on 8 people each and we were going to be marked for our performance in various aspects of the off-site which included punctuality. We were all shown our cells which contained 2.5 beds to accommodate 3 of us. The bathroom was almost as big as my apartment and much much cleaner, though it couldn’t match my apartment in terms of alcohol content. The shower was a hydra-thing. I mean it had multiple heads for aiming water at weird parts of your anatomy so had to be extra careful to make sure water wasn’t too hot or too hard. It didn’t come with a manual! Took me 2-3 days to figure out how to make it work without getting hurt in the process.

There was a major issue over room allocation but lets not get in to that. I managed to dump my baggage in the cell and fall asleep by 6:30 and after 30 minutes of deep, refreshing sleep I found myself with a breakfast plate in my hand, my hair all wet from what I assume must have been a sleepwalk through a shower, wondering WTF as I usually do. Staring back at me was a bowl of cornflakes whom I quickly devoured and went to on to eat more.

The day kicked off with a workshop on the Basics of Marketing at 9:30, which I have to admit was kind of useful considering how important it is in my job. The workshop plus the project went on for 2.5 hours before we were unchained for lunch. The assignment was to develop a marketing strategy for a product of our choice and for some reason we chose an online tutorial service and named is Vidya24x7 (Ugh! Don’t blame me for this one, it wasn’t my idea). I really don’t remember what I ate except that it wasn’t anything special. Must say that this hotel is beautifully done and apart from food I found everything else to be top notch.

Our post lunch siesta was interrupted time and again by a certain Mr Nanda who was hell bent on unleashing his talent upon a 100 barely awake, unsuspecting P******mers. But his ads caught my attention and soon my brain cells were waking each other up to learn something! He gave us the assignment to create ads for Railways targeting people who choose to fly or go by bus. I made 2 ads, this one was my favorite:

“Ever heard of a plane of thoughts?”
“Or a bus of thoughts maybe?”
“No?”
“Railways. Preferred by those who think.”

I liked the Ads made by Jhayu, Yo, the guy-who-loves-rhinos and even Bunny Singh who was lucky enough to be in our CD’s team. There was some real creative stuff people were pulling out from god-knows-where. I think it must be the air. This was followed by a brief break for tea and then the most interesting session on how to make a media plan by a certain Mr. NPS who is a co-founder of a leading Ad agency L****s.

Mr NPS turned out to be quite an interesting character though his presentation wasn’t as interesting. But we survived it. Frankly we were too brain dead by then to even realize whether it was boring or interesting. Mr NPS will make an appearance later again albeit under different circumstances.

Just when we thought the day was over it wasn’t to be. Every team was assigned an OE aka Outbound Expert and we were sent to participate in what was called The Temptation Crossing. I will get back to you on that tomorrow as it deserves a post of its own.