Onam @ IBM

Yea yea… i know you’re all fed up of my pookkalams 😀 But couldn’t resist this one 😀

We celebrated Onam @ IBM on 25 August, the day before I left to Wayanad (yes, I had gone to Wayanad on vacation…and that’s the next post coming up 😀 ;)).

Having had done this for 10 days at home, and then after going down in the dumps with a fever, I was not very keen on this one: especially because I was the only Malayali in the participating team and no one else really knew anything about the spirit of Onam.

The competition was to begin at 12.30 and had seven participating teams (and all of them had at least a few Malayalis in them :D), with 10 people in each team. There are 3 shifts working there: 7-4, 11-8 and 2-11pm. Since out team’s office timing is 2-11, we’d requested for a change in the timing–to begin at 2.30 or 3.00. Now, this was taken as a withdrawal of our participating team by the organising committee!

We reached the spot at 12.00, only to figure out that 3 people had ditched already! That left just 7 of us (6 girls and a guy), very little flowers (the ones who went to buy had no clue how much to get) and no space allotted to start on (yea, the Organising Committee assumed we weren’t participating, and decided not to allot space for us). After much haggling and everything, we got space allotted  for us, and began the process at 12.50 — 20 minutes later than the rest!

We sent two from the 7 to get more flowers, and managed with the remaining 5. Though we’d initially asked for 20 extra minutes, we finished along with the others. AND.

We got the 2nd place! 😀 Yeyyyy.

Our 'creative' design which got us the prize (inspite of obvious lack of flowers, less time and lesser teammates). That's (L-R) Munmun, Neela, Me, Vijay, Shruti, Kavya and Radhika 🙂

Yea, it may look very bleak, but well, ours was the only one with any concept in it. And honestly, there were other better ones 😉 😉 But we got it for the ‘teamwork’ and ‘productivity’ too 😀 😀 The rest were all the normal ‘designs’, like better versions of the 10 designs I bugged you all with. Hence, the prize 😉

Just us girls and the pookkalam 😉

Yea...that teeny weeny chocolate pack in Kavya's hand was our "prize"; the first prize winners got 2 such packs 😀 😀

Edited to add (with due apologies to Vimmuuu): For the uninitiated, the centre portion of the pookkalam depics half the face of a Kathakali and half of a shankh 🙂

Vimmuuu, I’d actually added this along with the caption to the first pic 😀 Wonder where it went off. My apologies!