Saturday, June 28, 2008

Savanadurga: A good get-away!


Got an opportunity to go to 'Savanadurga', a nice get-away, 60KMs from Bangalore. Event was a business offsite in a team of ~15 people.

Savanadurga was a short 1 and 1/2 hour drive from Bangalore. Access is good and after a nice breakfast got to the first activity of the day, Cave Exploration!. It was a novel experience making one's way through the crevices in the cave. It was fun to see people encouraging one another and lending a helping hand to tide over the challenges thrown by the oddly shaped natural rock formations that made up the cave. Photo sessions at every stop during the exploration ensured that the event is preserved for posterity. And these photos serve another important purpose; go over those in the next week or so and savor the experiences many more times. And definitely some of those could be fodder for couple of scoops, as well! Overall, the 3-hour activity was a first and nice experience for all of us. Followed by lunch and a short session of rapelling and games, we had the day filled with interesting events to make a truly different Friday.

Adventure tourism (like the one at Savanadurga) is a welcome respite from the usual business like offsites. Offsites are best when they are completely in an informal seting without a definite objective/goal to be met by end of the day. Let the team, that works together on a daily basis, be set loose for a day. There are enough elements that goes into the making of a successful offsite and those already do enough to help the team members bond well. Brainstorming on a suitable location, doing the preparatory work for the event (this often includes motivating some initially-disinterested people to signing up as a major activity), the event in itself and savoring great moments of the day post the event is truly a team-effort by design. The positive experience, sure, lingers for a couple of months at least. And then it is time for the next one!

Got something better!

Wanted to begin my experiments with blogging and since I didn't get anything better, I had started off with http://didnotgetanythingbetter.blogspot.com/. I was still looking for a more catchy name and think have got some seemingly better ones. Of the ones so far, prathaman looks OK and am shifting my base to here. 'prathaman' in Malayalam, my native tongue, means "that which comes first". In a sadya (feast), prathaman is the sweet dish (payasam) that comes first. I am not venturing more into the word prathaman and it' s etymology here. There is a lot of information on the internet. One of my friends also points that prathaman also means No.1. Can I complain?