Victory in a Corporate Challenge fest!

A couple of weeks back, we got an email saying there was a Corporate Challenge being
organised by Honeywell and as soon as we saw DC, we were all excited to take part in it.

Unusual requirement was, instead of the usual 3, they needed 4 ppl in the team. Aravind and I
were sure to take part, then we approached Aditya, from my junior batch and equally passionate about Dumb Charades, part of a good DC team in college and he approached us as well . Voila! We had 3 in the team. Next, we thought of Sridhar, my batch mate who was part of another equally kickass DC team in college. So here we were - 4 from Cisco set to take part. The funny part was all 4 of us were generally used to acting in our respective teams !!!

As is our wont, we did not bother doing anything till the last min. And a couple of days back, we decided to use "our"(Aravind and I) team's codes since 2 of us were in a majority. All we did was make fun of each other's codes and then we were all set to go to the fest.

Interestingly enough, our 3rd original DC team member Narayan, now part of another company,
also came with a different team .We definitely missed having him in our team, but we wished him the best of luck and hoped they would do really good as well.

To our surprise, there was tremendous response to the event , as there were overall 80 teams
taking part in DC from 45 different companies !!! We also found our perenial DC competitors -
previously from RV, now working for NI, taking part and we just wished each other , already
hoping that we would clash again in the finals.

The prelims started and by the time we went, we had already seen around 8 teams get all the 3
parts of the chit - a Personality, a movie and a word in less than 90 seconds and we had to get it well within time. I picked up a chit and had a "not so easy" set compared to others.

We got :
Tiger woods - very simple
Resident Evil - movie - kinda ok but tricky
Prank - again tricky.

But we had 3 great DC guys who transformed into amazing guessers and managed to get it in 58
secs which was very tricky coz' there were few other teams coming after us. At that stage we
were 5th in the standings. One more team cracked their chit in 55 secs and we were in the 6th
position and hoping that no other team would crack it ! And thats exactly what happened ! We
were the last team to qualify , the NI team was also there in the finals as expected and so were other equally talented teams and yo ! we were set for yet another duel!

The finals started and we shared the lead with the NI team after the first round. Second
round was a theme cum mirror round - where a particular theme was given and we had one actor acting, the other actor mirroring exactly what he was doing and the 2 guessers looking ONLY at the mirror. Luckily out of the 2 choices that were available - Harry Potter and Music, we got Harry potter and managed to crack the chit in 47 secs( out of 60) , and the crowd went
crazy and so did we - jumping on top of each other !! We were now in the lead !!

Next round probably defined the complete finals for us . All teams had to guess names of English movies, sorted into easy, moderate and tough categories and as many as possible in 90
secs. We defined our strategy to go for the tough category and we cracked that round big time! We got 6 tough ones in 90 seconds when most other teams only 2 moderate + 1 easy, 3 moderate and so on, which was truly fantastic! We hit a jackpot with 180 points ( 30 for
every tough one) and the organisers said " We are stunned that they could crack 6 of them in
the tough category" ! The other team did pretty well too - cracking 5 tough ones in 90 secs.

The final round required 3 actors to act 3 different things and connect them with a theme .Since our team was filled with actors , we just went with it and got a pretty easy set - Opera house , Eiffel tower and Statue of liberty, the connection being that they all lost in the race for the 7 wonders of the world .We cracked this set in 23 seconds and celebrated like we used to in college . Jumping up and down and sharing high fives !!

The difference in points between the 2nd team and our team was 108 and we were completely
ecstatic that we won convincingly! More than the gift vouchers ( which were very good!), we just
totally enjoyed the thrills and the spills and the adrenalin rush that just comes with DC since all 4 of us are pretty crazy about it!

The finals was watched by a packed audience and as we went down from the stage, people rushed to congratulate us and it continued throughout the evening. We even had people from other companies who went on stage to speak about the Fest as such, talk about having had a great time looking at the Cisco team in the DC finals!

More was to follow . The Cisco team came 6th in Mad ads and 2nd in the "Battle of the bands"
and guess what? We won the overall trophy which was a beautiful crystal trophy along with a
"man of the match" type of cheque saying that Cisco had won the event this year.

A fitting end to a great great day that will stay in memory for a really really long time!!!