Their Smile is Our victory!

Let me begin with something that I made for this day!

Be with the children..
Sun will give you shade,
Thirst condenses in you.,
Sweat makes you a swimmer..,
You swim across their happiness…!
Their smile is your victory!!
Each one of us achieved it!!!

A day… unlike any other day!

[Note: I’m not explaining about the event. This is just my experience during the event.]

Woke up and gave a call to the people to remind them for event. Some picked and some did not. Nothing bothered me much. All I thought was about how the complete day is gonna be. Pulled my socks to get ready at first, and got out of the room before anyone could ask me where I am going so early. Not that I’m superstitious, I focused myself to get the best from the Nature too. Made confirmation with a few people on their presence in the event. Gathered the confident to spend the day with the beautiful smiles.

Our first move!

Got the train at the Potheri Station, traveled an hour and got a call in between. “If Surya calls and asks you to buy something, kindly help him”, said Saiyasodaran. And, he did call. There we started our move. We got down the train at Park Station and walked through the construction roads and searched for some shops for buying the Knifes and Squeezers. We could find only shops that were either closed or that had only refreshments. Sairam and myself had a Tea and walked back with the Knife that we bought for the event. We walked through the unknown roads and finally we managed to reach the venue with a lot of confusions and plans.

Blood Rush that made me think

At a distance, I could spot the banner, “Vegam 2016”. The middle of the road was like the ground where I first enjoyed the volunteering in the Vegam 2014.
It gave a rush in the blood and Sairam shook my hands and I managed to cross the road and finally we entered the Stadium. The feel that you get when you saw the people running here and there with no sorrows. They have the best life.What are the sorrows that we call as one? Are they really one? Think about these kids. They are awesome and they taught me a lesson and made me think. Anything in life is possible and fulfilled for a normal child like us. What is there to be worried about for us? What is the reason that we are sad at times? What do you not have?? … Things went on accumulating in my thoughts. And I got a severe rush in my blood with a goose-bump, which made the two poles of my system get into contact.

@ the Registration Counter

After giving the knife to Surya, I came running with Sairam to register. We got our tasks at different spots. We should have been earlier. I stood in the line and gathered myself to swipe out my sweat and get ready to sweat more.

Your name?

Dhina, G Surendar Thina!

mm., here it is.. G Surendar Thina… Think-Digital right!?

Yess., I looked her completely baffled.

Haii, this is me Rachel.

Wow! The QA person!!, I exclaimed.

Then I moved further and got the allotted task and moved on further.

@ the School No. 5

I looked around the great arena and was highly impressed. Marched to the school that was allotted to me and Sai. the moment I reached them, they welcomed us with a huge smile and shaking of hands. I could see only the happiness that they expressed. A girl asked for water. The first help that I did for them. Got nervous suddenly and went into the crowd and brought water for the children.

I remember a few of them who were with me until they left the event. Babu, Chottu, Jansie, Pattampoochi, Ali, Pradheeba…

I took them to their Zones and they enjoyed the events. All my school students got Selected for the finals. Jansie, Chottu and Babu were really confident about winning the prize. Babu was the winner for the last time also in his event. Chottu was the winner in his event for the past 4 years. Felt glad to be with them.

As jansie said, at the last she was going to get her prize. That was damn amazing. I would like to say to all the people who are still feeling shy to go into the field and do anything. Look at this kid’s confidence in her winning. She is an inspiration obviously.

@ the Other Schools

Other members from TD were in the other schools and I’m waiting for their update on this day. [Mail it to me ASAP to add it here 🙂 ]

Something that killed me :/

LFC School: Couldn’t even serve those buds who asked us for snacks help. A school teacher really made a big scene towards us when we communicated with the kids. They were deaf and dumb and that was their specialty. They talked so cute by their signs. Just loved them a lot. What’s wrong in us talking to them?? The teacher stared at me as if I had asked her phone number or her address. I stared at her back too. She said, “If they have communication with you all, then the school sister will screw them”. But it is the teacher who will go and inform to the sister. So this teacher had problems if we Interacted. This is the problem that the children face. This will lead the students to think a lot negatively and thus they start thinking a lot on what they are even forced not to do. This is the problem for any teenage student now. But it is sad that even these kids face this problem. I have nothing to tell more. It is the School that has to think about it.

Technically Speaking 😉  _saiy2k

A `big` story, that I wanted to share with you all. It’s about Vegam. Pls do read

* Vegam 2014 Situation *

< 500 students joined from around 20 schools. and that was our Max.
We didn’t have any online Registration portals and Student registration happens on the same day.

As and when Students arrives, a team of 5 members with laptops will enter all student details in excel, along with the event they chose to participate. It happens from 9 to 11 AM, when the Registration closes.

Then couple of Excel Ninjas, combines all 5 sheets into 1, split into event based sheets take print outs and hand over to Event Coordinators in half an hour!

It’s a totally brain draining, exhausting work for Reg Panel Volunteers. They can’t move anywhere for that 2 hour and glued only to Keyboard and Monitor, as if they are totally jacked into Matrix.

In 2013, it was a good process as the numbers were < 300. But in 2014, with around 500 students, it was too much pushing and more than all, events were delayed till 11.30AM! The process was not scalable to any number higher. 500+ students seems to be impossible.

* Next Step for Vegam 2015 *

Then for 2015, we were discussing that we need to do student registration before the day and brainstorming various ideas. Like sending Reg form with event list in Courier to schools and then get filled form atleast a week back. So we would have planned everything before. But in this process also, there are many missing things like Generation of Chest numbers would be hard, and the school can’t make any changes, add / update / delete students, after they sent courier and it had many more issues.

But then Prithvi came up with this awesome idea of Automation. That’s when, Myself, Thina and Sunil worked on Online Vegam Registration Portal, which covered most Use cases:

1. Schools can register with all comfort, change, update when required.
2. We are able to generate School based, Event based list with ease for any number of students, in a button click. This required 30 mins of Excel Ninjas to do for ~500 studs.
3. Auto generated Chest Nos. Did u see a A4 sheet pasted in back of every student. It’s the Chest no., generated by our system and we can easily identify the disability of student, name, age, school, etc., with ease.
4. And many more.

The system IS DOING MAGIC from last year and it lifted the barriers of scaling up and made 1000+ students a possibility. With this system that we developed last year, we could now even scale up to 10000 students. That’s the beauty of technology. Scalability!

Very happy to have Thina and Sunil that time to have developed this system and Gayathri this year for giving a completely new look to the Portal 🙂

There were requirements of doing Mobile app to automate MC Desk and many on day functionalities from Prithvi for this Vegam! I wish I could have done those. But because of my own schedules, I couldn’t do it. But next year, we will make it pakka 👍

* Going Forward *

In the same way, many of the Society’s woes has very simple tech solutions and as soldiers of Tech, it’s our duty to create this Tech Magics and enable Volunteers in field to move to next level.