200 hours learning and 60 hours fun, starting with the OBL

An illusion called sleep was the status message of one of my friends on Gtalk recently. This is exactly how we at SCMHRD felt on the 4th of June itself.
1st June: Announcement, announcement, we have a good news and a bad news, which one do you want to hear first.
Does this line ring a bell? A very common line heard day in and day out. A good news has to be followed by a bad news. So here it goes.
Good News: We are going for an Outbound Learning.
Bad News -Danger, Alert: We have to leave at 6 in the morning.
OBL was the saviour from academic rigor but also acted as our first sleep spoiler (Don’t worry there are many more to come.). After a bit of groaning and moaning, all of us were excited about the fact that we were going to have fun. We got into the bus and reached a place called Shantivan. There we saw a few scary people (What else would you call a lieutenant and a colonel?..:P). After giving us a few dos and donts (by now everyone had gotten tired of the dos and donts), our batch was divided into teams of 11 each.
Now the hell, fun and everything starts. My group was supposed to go trekking on the first day itself to Sinhagad fort. Was it as simple as a trek with a bunch of aimless and jobless friends? Certainly not. The twist was that it was supposed to be competition among teams. And that was not it, all the team members would have to reach, only after which the team would get their points. Initially, there was no problem in climbing, but after sometime I could only wonder and ask myself why the hell was I even trying. How often have you thanked the person at the nimbu paani stall? If you have not yet done it, then start trekking, you will definitely thank her.:P. I should also really be thanking Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy and other music directors who made awesome music apt for the climb (remember Lakshya). Oh, not to forget my teammate who played all these songs while climbing the seemingly never ending terrain.
Thanks to my team members and my self-determination I somehow managed to complete the trek (Also let me blow my little trumpet and say the time taken by us wasn’t bad by any stretch of imagination.) Now after reaching to the top, we were given some Glucose biscuits. Poor me, I hate glucose biscuits but I felt at that time anything thrown at me to eat was honey. Climbing down was a much simpler task, the weather supported us and also since the competition factor got eliminated we started walking as if we were the kings and queens of the place, clicking photographs, posing at all possible points. (I must tell you that in MBA even all those who have absolutely no craze for photographs start becoming Dabboo Ratnani’s)
Our second task for the day was to present a small skit or any other such thing which could entertain everyone. So everyone put on their thinking caps and the Bachchans, Deepikas, Madhuris woke up in each of them. After that we were told that the next day events would start by 7. So we decided to sleep, but some angel had said forget the word SLEEP. Fire, fire ! Run and reach the open area. A hoax call.(Reminded me of the good old days at Lehman Brothers). The whistle was blown, all of us in our night suits, half pants, out of the lodges and reached the garden. (There were people having their bath at night. Just imagine their plight!) . After assembling, we were told to make tents and a competition once again. So we had half broken tents, wrongly placed tents and the good ones made the good, ready to lie down tents( Ours was the 3rd option, Perfect team that we were..:P). Now hopefully after this they will not trouble us, but then rumour was rife that there would be another one soon (One piece of advice: never to listen to rumours in colleges )
Next day we were supposed to play games. Some of them were physically challenging: imagine carrying a heavy girl on your hand and having to do something like a relay. Some were mentally challenging: Chinese Knot, never try this game, those who succeeded surely have cheated..:P:P. The remaining were teaching us the importance of team work and decision making. We climbed on every possible thing, be it the drums, ropes, tyres, planks, you just mention it and we had climbed on it and done our tasks. We were blindfolded, made to crawl in mud, make caricatures and do everything that on normal days you definitely would not do or should I say want to do.
But at the end it was so much fun and we did not even realise how the 2 days flew. We bade goodbye to all of them and shantivan and returned back to the hostel with memories still lingering in our minds.