DAY 1 - RESONATION & WORKSHOPS :
Prasanna and other backend volunteers sleep deprieved, were still organizing stuff on accomodation, and hall arrangement for workshops. I managed to escape the chaos, and took some sleep by 2:00 A.M. and woke early to find that our hostel rooms either had a bad bathroom doors or at best does not have one.... :). Talk to me about privacy.....
→ Before Session
Aaaahhh.... Shit... i have to go to lu... and then i decided to convince myself to control my natural instincts using heavy cognitive - neural - emotional dispersion - mechanisms. Then i remembered that the main hall where we were working last night had awesome toilets, and decided to release my controls & dams over there.... you should have seen my face bursting with emotions in between travel time.... from hostel to the main hall - during which the watch man in the hostel have stopped me requesting some bags for him assuming that i am the incharge of the whole guys staying in hostel. U know.. with my pressure building up my behind, and in the verge of breaking, i have accepted his assumption and never explained him that i was just one of other volunteers, and in turn assured him give him one - which i have never fulfilled.... ;D
... i bet every volunteer who stayed in the hostel would have undergone such control mechanism atleast once.... :D
→ During Session
Here comes the next big wave for me: Even after workshop session started, my allocated hall is still empty. After arranging necessary resources like benches, projectors and stuff, ... then came the spot registered students from a nearby college... I started as usual discussing and getting to know them. They were just pre-final engineering students of E.C.E. I could easily handle students.
Now enters a peer of elderly age who have worked in Kerala Agricultural University in GIS associated with vegetation for 15+ years.... I bet no other workshops would have seen a participating peer of this diversity. What shall i do now....
Now, the second wave of people who of Geography professors teaching GIS, cartography, and were using FOSS tools extensively in their life. Whereas, my GIS experience is just 3+ years and everything i learned is sporadic and self taught in the free time i got. Although i believed my fundas are stronger, i thought i could not even entertain them... and with continuous flow of students from nowehere the nearly empty hall was filling and i had to restart everything often to the incoming people.
Now i am literally confused where to start, on one side, we have got students who never opens their mouth for any stuff i queried about.... on the other hand we've got experienced GIS experts... that is one hell of a bandwidth range which i need time to think of... Have u ever seen Dexter's laboratory ?, in one of the episondes, his brain would go haywire with his work pressure... i nearly felt like that. With overflowing of GIS information which i had to cramp the 4 day content and provide it in one day and need to handle the session... i was jumping between topics so wildly....
Then came to my help, geography professors, who initiated a interactive session that helped relieve my pressure and he took almost the whole morning session.... I learned a little bit of art of teching from him ;).... Had a nice little talk and gone for lunch. After lunch we assembled again and i have demonstrated as much stuff as possible, and have infused usage of FOSS, tools, philosophies, etc wherever possible - which have actually pressed me to write a blog post about the demonstration itself, so that those who like to learn about it, can try it in their home.
→ After Session
Had nice dinner, physically tired, and then met my peer (Tamil Wikipedian & Entrepreneur).... Lenin, master in Nano-Science officially, as usual we spoke about a lot on day to day stuff, and deep philosophical shit too. Particularly i like the language + slang of Lenin, the way he expresses stuff is common man and simple. He is literally awesome as he is one of the key volunteer who have arranged for printing banner, drawing logos, etc... even during pressing grave family situations. These men are the inspirors who made other volunteers do the volunteering work so awesomely. During all discussions, we are accompanied by Venkatesh from FSFTN - with all this interesting thoughts and intervention strategies.... that led me and Venkatesh to have a good long talk.. :D