Balle balle

Well, it is 4 in the morning, and I have a lecture tomorrow at 11. And going by the number of hours that I can now manage to sleep, I'd better hit the bed soon. But again, even though I wanted to just drop dead, I couldn't resist the urge to post about a victory.

Hey, do you remember when I wrote about the SIFE competition being one of the things I was worried about? Well, that took place on 17th and 18th of June, i.e. over the last weekend. The competition took place in Mumbai.

Well, the first day was a regional round, where 4 teams were to be chosen from 17. And guess what?? Our NIRMA SIFE team was adjudged the regional winners!! Yahoo!!

Not only did this mean we'd done one better than our senior batch (they'd been runners-up at the regional level the previous year), but also that we'd be participating the next day in the National Finals.

Saturday night was when our 5 member team really put in a lot of effort. We were awake till 5 in the morning, aware of the fact that we had to leave the hotel at 8. However, we were just so excited that we kept on going over the PowerPoint presentation over and over again, making changes here and there, discussing possible questions and also the financials of the business plan that we'd thought up for the sustainability of an effort to help a co-operative movement of the farmers of Gujarat.

The finals was a keenly fought competition at The Hyatt. It was a day long affair, and featured the best in the business. The 12 member group of judges were CEOs, HR heads and CFOs representing Syntel, Reliance (Anil Dhirubhai Ambani group), HSBC, HDFC, Monsanto, Diageo and others. Our team definitely felt the jitters as well as the excitement of competing at the national level.

And it paid off...

(from left: Sonal Singh, Mithun Shah, Kushan Jasani [standing in the background], me, Ketul Sir [our faculty guide], Jyotika Agarwal and Sneha Goenka)

We were adjudged the National Runners-up. And boy, was it a great feeling!!

Talk about starting the academic year with a bang.