NOSTALGIA '11 - A journey

Friendship is a magical sensation that can ignite your senses and enthrall your spines. When such a relation is brought to a closer indentation, once in a year, amidst all our routine chaos and hectic timelines, it really brushes up the fragrance of oneness which was once the only survival factor, during the period ’03-‘07 :) Yes, I am talking about NOSTALGIA ’11, its celebrations and ecstatic imprints, it left behind on the people who were a part of it.

We chose “THE FARM” restaurant located on the beautiful and picturesque OMR stretch. With the tight schedule of IT demands, we live on weekends and merely exist on weekdays! Hence we wanted this weekend’s life to be filled with Food, Fun and Frolic. The appropriate place for all of these was the FARM. The vast expansive area running through acres of landscape, the dense coconut grooves, the dazzling woods and thorns all along the way, the scintillating lake and its runway marshes are few of the highlighting spots of FARM. The place was exactly on line with the activity, ARMVILLE we had in store for the participants.

On arriving at the place, one could not help notice unusual lounges right beneath the open sky and the seats made of naked wood and stone benches. This is the main restaurant area. The reception began with a welcome drink of divinely cold and sweet tender coconut. People started getting collected at the lounges when we were busy setting up the ARMVILLE grounds for the participants. This is a place called coconut grove outside the restaurant. They had a nice chat with each other, had few attempts of badminton and stared moving towards the coconut grove.

Upon reaching the grove, we began the game show. The game basically had 4 skills based on which activities were planned, viz. Strength, Speed, Accuracy and Strategy. We divided the participants into 4 groups with 4 members each. The game was designed to progress with increasing levels of difficulty across these 4 skills. The cumulative score of all the levels were taken for the ranking of the teams on progressing levels. The following table gives the list of games and levels of difficulty.

Level s	Speed	Strength	Accuracy	Strategy
Level 0	Running Race	Lynches	Goli adikardhu	Word Puzzles
Level 1	Hopping	Push ups	Bow and Arrow Hit I	Aptitude
Level 2	Sack race	Carry Water buckets	Bow and Arrow Hit II	Puzzles
Level 3	Frog race	Carry stone	Bow and Arrow Hit III	Vidugathai
Level 4	Hurdles	Climbing tree	Bow and Arrow Hit IV	Anagrams

These tasks would serve as training to prepare the participants for the final event, i.e. the battle task. The Battle task included games of all the skill levels with more fun and enthusiastic elements. It had Target hitting on the marshy lake water, monkey crawl, life-size Paramapatham and finally fetching flag poles by dodging the bear. The games were planned in such a way that it had increasing levels of difficulty, surprises and curiosity J

Another fascinating aspect of the place was it food and the ambience of serving. Hunting for a sumptuous meal, we dint want to settle with the normal starters, soups, breads and the rice. We had a few exciting FARM specialty dishes which included Beer Can Chicken, Make your own Pizza, Achari Paneer Tikka and the Aloo parathas.

The feast area which houses the kitchen, or the food prep area, the cooking area, grilling area, ovens, tandoors and the actual feasting area where everything except the kitchen is made solely using materials from the farm, where I mean to say, chairs are made using wood from the farm, cooking happens over a mud chula, baking happens hand built ovens, grills are done over charcoals and firewood from the trees in the farm and so on, and this, in a gist is what you are introduced to before settling down to the actual eating.

Altogether it was a very different and a welcoming change from the routine lifestyle :) Would like to hear more from the participants as comments :)