From: Ramakrishnan K [KRamakrishnan@novell.com] Sent: Tuesday, September 19, 2000 12:56 PM Subject: Version 2000 - Day 2 & 3. Day 2: After 'pongal'ling late into the precious day night, we were deep asleep only to be awaken by Raghu Ganesh and Nicel... After a mini bath, proceeded to Barn hoping to enjoy another wonderful day, 'aaram se'. And it did turn out to be one. The second days breakfast was Pongal minus the vada and the hypers gave our peace of mind to Ramku (incharge of Food) for having changed the tradition and missed out on the vada with the hole. But didnt forget to thrash the Pongal. The first finals was Project Management. The topic - web enablingTele shopping. It was such a comedy watching this programme. Each team covered only a few aspects of building a ecom site and the best among the worst award was bagged by Christ college, followed by SNDT, Mumbai. Looks like Version and walk outs r made for each other. I had promised to get back to u on the PSG Tech issue. The issue was, when PSG had 'logged-in'to Version, one of our guys had made a remark that PSG hasnt invited RECT for the annual event 'LOG-IN' for the past 2 years and that RECT has been consistent in inviting them though. Having won the over all for two years in a row, the PSG Guys were quite embarrased and so had called up their HOD who had blasted them, asking them to apologise with RECT for not sending invitations and return without participating. Following this one of the reps of log-in had come all the way from CBE and met Harish and handed over a personal invite for Login 2000. This incident could have been easily avoided had the guy who pointed out this to PSG tech put it in the right way. Lets hope such things dont repeat in the years to come. There were few prelims in the second day too, including the one for web design and Catch the word.. here is where the hypers showed the delegates the tricks of the trade by putting up their team, consisting of Priya, Kanaka and Dinesh. The web design prelims was tough and it was a low score affair, with the highest among the low scores moving onto the finals.. i was told that Dinesh was going to judge the finals of this event along with BR. I prayed for the good of Dinesh and what else one can do ??? We had GD in the afti and it was nothing short of a fish market. The topics were quite interesting.."should Mahesh and Leander separate", "What will yeilding to Veerapans demand lead to??", "Will GD identify a leader" (and we were proved that it doesnt..:):)) etc., It was good fun (and at times painful for our ears too) watching this event. We had Midas Click and prelims for Tech crossy after this. Due to Rangarajans demise, there wasnt any band this time and so the organizers had put in more efforts to keep the junta engaged. They tried their bit and were quite successful. The first years put up a skit on 'Kaun banega crorepati' which was well received. Till now i had not mentioned about the first years, since I didnt get to know many of them. They were moving along in groups confined to the third bay of Barn. They r 22 in strength including 6 girls. I was told that the strength might not increase since they might not release fresh lists to fill up the vacancies. With nothing much to do after the girls left back to their den, we went out for a cup of coffee and returned to the hostel by midnight. Sidhu, Gowthaman and Kalyan who had attended Wilco interview, couldnt make it and the final years were pretty upset about it. Day 3 : Day three started with marketing, and the products given were as interesting as they have ever been, "selling a paper weight to an astronaut", "Tiger skin to WWF activist", "2000 watts PMPO sound system to hospitals" to mention a few.. the judges and the audience had a good time as usual. Following this was General quiz and the audience had a lot of chances to their knowledge. The questions were balanced and not to mention the extensive use of in-house innovative packages to make the quiz more interesting.. good work guys, keep it up. Then it was "Catch the word", guys from MKU were doing very well, may be they got some tips from the hypers team. There was some glitch in organizing this.. after the first two rounds, they had the teams take the remaining three rounds together at a stretch citing time constraints. But I felt that they ended up spending more time than it would have by having rounds separately since all the teams wanted a briefing of the rules everytime when they took the three rounds together. We had Tech quiz in the afti, and to justify the theme of the meet, we had a round on 'Cybernetics'. As mentioned by Raghuganesh in his mail, Vidya who compered this was a bit fast and had to repeat the questions every time she posted one. The questions were as per the de-facto standard and again the audience had quite a few questions to answer. After our lunch, we proceeded to Mock press and the interesting personalities given, created a lots of expectations. The personalities included, Farooq Abdullah, Kapil, Deepa Mehta, Mr.Dr.Veerapan, Bal Thackeray. Surprisingly the panel which consisted of the only and only Vengat (he was here again, for version 2000 to judge mock press and Systems Analyst) awarded the first place to Farooq, posed by a SNDT Girl, one of Goa univ girls, who was Kapil got the second. Of course, the decision of the judges is final :) then it was much anticipated event of the meet, the systems analyst. It had four finalists and surprisingly all Guys. Vengat and Gopinath (who came for Version 98) had a galloping time stressing the four finalists. And finally a guy from MKU won the systems analyst and MKU finished on top much ahead of Christ college and Goa university. And when the organizers heaved a sigh of relief with only the valedictory ceremony to go and having conducted all the events pretty well, there was a sudden black out and as a poor display of RECT Admin, it never came back for more than an hour. So for the first time, the valedictory was conducted in the open air, in front of portico of the ad block. What a way to end such a wonderful meet which went on without any glitch !! There is nothing that our guys could have done about this and the RECT administration has to realise its poor preparedness. Overall, Version 2000 was very successful much like its predecessors. The hospitality, accomodation, food, events, time management were all at its best. The final years should be quite relaxed now and the second years should be very happy, the first years would have started looking forward to Version 2001. The event still remains to be a prestigious event among MCAs and hope the juniors will keep the flag flying high, always!! With the event getting better and better with years. This means more expectation from the colleges which the guys at RECT have to meet. Going by Version 2000, i have no doubts about Version 2001 at all, and i am eagerly awaiting the dates of Version 2001. This sums up my narration of Version 2000. affly, Ramki.