We Started from Pondicherry by evening 5:30 PM and got trapped into the public transport service, setting our journey destination to Calicut. This is a shore city to shore city journey - coinciding almost on the same latitude. Romantacizing it, i understood that we are travelling from a shore where sunrise is common -- to a shore where sunset is common. I tried to read a significant part of Roads to Freedom by Bertrand Russel. I could never go more that a few pages during the travel. Afterall, What would usually us boys would discuss in travel ??? Surprisingly significant part of the discussion was about what are we actually trying do as a cooperative, and whether we are in right path at both principal and pragmatic level. Is it ok to expect complete success of the intiative ... and such stuff. Plainly the discussions are at an abstract level but intellectually charged. More often where our emotional bonding floated to the surface, reinforcing our trust based on a common need & goal.
Stop 0 : Puducherry
I weared a shorts, and i could feel heat & humidity, even when plenty of air is flowing through. Our midnight talks and discussions in the bus, that obviously disturbed the neighbour passengers helped me to forget about the mild dampness in my skin. We have travelled through beautiful rivers of Pondicherry surrounded by few flamboyant mangroves, and within 2 hours reached Cuddalore, where the discussion has been initiated by someone regarding love life and alternative relationship models. Unfortunately, we didn't took any photos as the conservations are kind of seriously fun and filled with constant buzz from the engine noise.
Stop 1 : Salem
While the bus came to a Hotel stop near Salem we ate lot of Idli's, Idiyappam's, Dosas & some Chola Puri's and packed ourselves with lot of eatables for the remaining hours of bus travel. Prasanna, one of our Cooprade have funnily explained in detail how eachone's stool would shape and colour based on the eatable we planned to consume during the journey. We also had the discussion will the bus conductor allow us to stop the bus at some arbitrary place IF someone had real disposal urgency !. Almost all the eatables we bought were never consumed based on the imagined situations in each of our minds, where the suffering person would be thyself. Ha ha... LOL. I did imagined myself asking for a emergency stop. By this time, our OSM'er cooprade Kamalavelan, took out his phone and started tracing out GPX tracks using OSMAnd application which i envied as i could not do it - currently being a luddite. Cooprade Ragulkanth sitting next to me was asking me several real questions about my reality, capacity, experience, learning, threshold points, tragedy of commons, etc.. which i think i have answered without any untruth. And as always we have teased our Cooprade Maniraj, for his cuteness and endurance to peer pressure. He is learning all things cooperative and sometimes i personally reach my threshold of temper, but that trains me how to interact with people and empathize them more. Even when i break, it helps me to avoid the conditions of tragedy of commons because of emotional charges and reservations that might sprout in my mind - a Bayesian approach.
Stop 2 : Coimbatore
Time: almost 1:15 AM. This is where we all woke up from few hours of sleep. My eyes were burning. I badly needed water. Searched for it and with hesitation, asked gigantic shopkeeper for water. With his bulky red eyes, he pointed his huge hand to a haunted damp place where i could see shining from water drops. Meanwhile, cooprades went on to buy nasty packaged flavoured juice packets. This has tempted me and after having water in a bottle, came back to them and bought a juice packet for me too. Hell, its not good and its a bad decision. It was also costlier. Then back to bus and felt the heat wave generated within the bus from the gas bombs released due to food intake from earlier stopping from all passengers in the bus. I could literally feel the heat and smell. Yet nobody is going to even talk about it, as we are all part of the sin. LOL. Still i had fun thinking earlier conversations. Tips: Do not eat much in your travel, especially if you have bowel movement problems. I accidentally (more like wantedly.. duh ) happen to eat a bun and jam preserved by Prasanna, which resulted in burps after burps for every road bumps and turnings with the bus. It sounded like i was signaling every bump and turnings the bus had to go. It is completely a bad decision. Yet i tried to sleep. Cooprades already went to sleep some with even "sound" sleep. Jealous came to my face.
Stop 3 : Kozhikode
Time : by 4:45 AM. We somehow reached Calicut, without knowing that the bus has to go via IIM Calicut. I didn't had any experience with bus travel to Calicut. We are almost 11Km away from the destination. We were at KSRTC bus station. The interesting thing about Calicut city is that it has 3 bus terminus. One near the railway station is what i am more familiar with like 6 years back in time. Immediately i can recognize that the city has changed a lot. Sidewalks were paved and lot better now, and saw huge rise in shopping malls, consumer good shops all along the street. Looks like neo-liberal economy has also influenced this malabar city heavily. Fortunately many Co-op societies still sustain and many have been modernized too. On the whole, the feeling is warm. But we still have long way to reach. Really i was confused about the mind map i had about the city. It felt mainly strange for me. Visual interpretation became more and more challenging. Soon, from the new bus stand, i came to know that to reach Kunnamangalam, buses will start from Palayam bus stand. Immediately with the help of OSM, while simultaneously marking unavailable POI's some of our cooprades helped in guiding our way towards Palayam. It was almost 5:30 AM. We walked and walked and walked, and we had to see the beautiful market road with its buzzing early morning activity managing logistics, storage and dispatch. Now Calicut looked lively and brisk, waking up from its sleep. With huge load of tiredness we reached Palayam. I had to enquire around and waited for the bus until 6:15 AM. We got a bus, with beautiful 90's Tami lsongs played we reached IIM Calicut.
Stop 4 : IIM Kozhikode
IIM looked simple and humble, and for how many time i dont know, called Abinandh, a good organizer from ULTS, for the Coopathon has guided us to reach the venue. After initial checking in the gate security, all 6 of us has been allowed to pass through. No auto rickshaws were available and we cooprades with our raging blood instantly agreed to walk. Security personnel encouraged its just a morning walk. Surprisingly we had to see a section of the land alloted for RSS bakths. STRANGE for us. OK. The road started to become steeper and steeper. Bypassers in autorickshaws(i still dont know where they got served) and scooters gawked at us with strange look. May be, because we all weared 3/4ths and trousers, smell and look. We took some rest and had some selfies in the way. IIM had this steps connecting the hairpin roads, which helped to bypass easily. Now i could understand why i heared a slight smile in Abinandh's voice. :D. But i like the mini-trek experience. By this time all of us were wet with sweat. We smelled and decided to go directly land in our rooms.
Atlast, with stench, tired eyes, aching stomach, tightened muscles, we reached the allocated rooms at Hostel J by 7:30 AM. The rooms are quite good and for all of us it felt like we are staying in a 3star hotel. Its a good environment for a student. Good window look with forests and nice shared corridor with adjacent rooms for collaboration and chat. Two little kittens with their mother cat lying around in our floor is really cool. And almost all of our cooprades go crazy for cats and dogs. Especially we love cats for their cuteness, fierceness, flexibility, cleanliness, little paws & whiskers. Kittens most of the time lying around our room doors. Restrooms are spacious, with water coming at pressures equivalent to riot control vans and fire engines. It provided a good bathing massage.
We were warned to attend the registration within an hour. Ample amount of time have been spent on bathing and resting. While some of us still in the bathroom, i couldnot stop my urges for registration (because only then i would get some nice food). Informed my fellow cooprades about it, and started to walk towards the venue, where everything is new and strange for me. The place almost looked like a maze, and i had to see the wall posters to find which floor am i in. I landed on the 5th floor, where it looked like a elite restaurant, with only few people eating. Again because of shyness, i had to wait for my cooprades to arrive. Then came to my mind, this would not be the place for us. Then i found our breakfast at 4th floor and waited. We had a good breakfast and still suffering from change in pressure, and humidity, tiredness lingering in our eyes, planned to attend the Coopathon.
Conference & Coopathon Split
With all of us registered to both the conference as delegates & as coopathon participants, we were kind of confused which to attend. We tried coopathon auditorium for 30 minutes, and found that we could not tolerate the Kerala Startup Mission's PR videos. Then we decided to move to conference, where atleast we could gain knowledge from fellow researchers, cooperatives and experts in the fields. We sat and listened to the scheduled talks and presentations for almost 90 minutes, which is when i got a call from Mr. Mohit Dave, ICA researcher, about our presentation to be screened for Coopathon. We splitted our group into two, one sitting and litening to the Conference and record them, and remaining sleepy heads decided to move to coopathon hall and getting ready for the presentation. Since i took the task of presenting, i was called and tried to accomodate fellow cooprades in the stage.
By the time, it looked almost all of the audience were kind of sleepy, and as usual cheered them a little bit. Then asked them questions, tried to be humurous and spoke about our history, our reason, while still our presentation was not on the wall. Kamalavelan had spoke about what we are trying to do currently, and why it is important to be a cooperative and how hard it is to stay as a cooperative. In the mean time, i was gawking at the bigggggg screen wall hoping to see our presentation. Bad luck, only when we both about to finish our pitching and presentation, the projection started working and that too we didn't had any control over it. With a minor dissatisfaction and huge encouragement from the audience, we left the stage for fellow presentors. This is where we happened to met Farmer Sanghey from Bhutan and Mr. Santhosh kumar from ICA where we heard lot more aligned philosophies, principles, pragmatized cooperative attempts from traditional models to modernized models. I find those two talks highly encouraging and could easily network with them. We are happy that the coopathon presentation we participated did not gone for waste. And yeah, our presentation got little bit emotionally charged. :D
Lunch & Post Lunch
We had a good lunch for the first time after reaching IIM. Some of us had lunch allocated for conference delegates while some had at both. It was fun. By the time my headache went to unbearable condition and i am dozed off. I am in complete hibernation mode. Energy gone down. Looking for some pills desperately to alleviate the pain. I should'nt have damped my hair during morning bath. However, our integrated pharmacist, Kamal had some Paracetamals and i accidently took 2 of them, still i do not know the reason why did that. Then we continued to attend the conference, where the legend says that i had been sleeping the whole time along with cooprades - to a level where it is even clearly visible from the stage to a state where fellow delegates in our row had to riseup and leave the space. Sleep is contagious. Following is the proof. We met Harsh from Nilenso, and we went on discussing about the license issue i kept on the stage. That's a long discussion we had and resulted in better understanding of license structures.
We got a urgent call from the coopathon organizers asking us to join the hackathon. We went very late and the count down time has already initiated. Some of our cooprades came later and joined us. The halls are huge filled with youngsters like me and still younger than me - everyone with their laptops filled with stickers doing something. Many of the organizing team members where mentoring the hackathon team members guiding them with problem statements, what is actually needed, what is a coop, etc... how to solve some crucial problems etc... After arranging our seats in the available space, we were smiling at each other, for some arbitrary reason. My head banging was mild and soothed with pills now, but still had the tiredness lingering. I could feel the friction between my eye balls and eyelids. Its a horrible feeling. Most of the time our laptops were in the organization and planning mode just to make it ready for the hackathon session.
Hackthon & Food
We naturally started to align ourselves with the hackathon. Cooprades Ragulkanth and Kamalavelan started studying and hacking the backend stuff, while Cooprades Prasanna & Manimaran started hacking the existing Android frontend functionality. Me have started to tinker with the presentation, logo, etc... stuff needed for pitching for highlighting the features, properties, characteristics, objectives, design strategies of our cooperative. Cooprade Maniraj, was kind of started to draw the assets required for the application after a short spiky debate. This is how he tests my threshold of anger management. Given his interest for drawing and illustration he has the potential for becoming a good artist. It would be indoctrination if i force him to do that, as he is a diversity lover. We kept hacking till night 9:00 PM, with several breaks consuming good amount of coffee, tea, awesome biscuits, and other perks. Thanks for IIM hospitality, our abs were always full. Thanks a lot for food organizing team who are generous and responsible in keeping our abs filled with satisfaction.
Rest
We finally decided to go take rest, and come back charged tomorrow to further complete atleast few of our planned tasks & milestones in hand. We left the hackathon facility by 10:00 PM and left to hostel room, found the switch for the AC, took a fresh bath, had good amount of sleepy discussion and naturally fell to sleep with boyful dreams. My past life @ Kozhikode came back as nostalgia. I remembered past events and friends & eventually slept happily.