The Sole Witness

Pune

HasGeek’s DocTypeHTML5 was happening in Pune, and after confirming with jace (kiran) that it wont happen in Goa, four of us packed our bags and jumped onto a bus which dropped us to Pune. Oh wait…it wasn’t that easy! This was a learning experience in various ways and mainly in travel management for me.

While I was spending my days in panjim for IFFI, I booked four tickets to Pune at Panjim counter of KTC out of which two were supposed to be boarding from Margao and other two were from Ponda. And inspite of telling the counter fellow repeatedly about our boarding plans, the guy still wrote our boarding point as Panjim. Consequence of this was me getting Pranav’s call saying that their name wasn’t there in Margao passenger list.  Moreover when we boarded the bus from Ponda, mine and Ankur’s name wasn’t there in the list too and this was turning out to be a mess. We came to Panjim and now there was more chaos. A fairly young couple having tickets with same seat numbers as that of me and Ankur boarded the bus. First of all, the bus was running an hour behind its schedule as it was stuck in traffic at Old Goa feast. People were pissed already. Sorting out the issue with the couple took another 40 minutes and the TC made them seat on 13-14 seat nos. instead of 23-24 that belonged to me and Ankur. When bus reached Mapusa, another fairly old couple who had actually booked 13-14 boarded the bus. More chaos! TC requested the young couple to take the seats that were behind us ie 27-28 and these stubborns wouldn’t agree to that. They either wanted 13-14 or 23-24 and I was firm on not giving up the seats. Finally TC came up to me and asked me to change the seats instead. I reluctantly did just because the bus wouldn’t have moved further and we wanted to reach Pune on time.

When bus stopped at Kolhapur, the stubborn young couple realised that they have boarded the wrong bus. They were supposed to go to Miraj and instead landed up in Kolhapur at 3 am in the morning. Seriously..WTF? They disappeared well before they could face everybody else’s agony.

We reached Pune quite late as expected. Ramrao uncle was in pune with his MCA students for their industrial tour/placements and we went to his room to freshen up. After that, we took a rick straightway to CoEP and marched at canteen. The rick fellows were surprisingly nice and I didn’t even feel like I was in Pune until we met the rude Canteen guy at CoEP. This was our “Assa Puneri” welcome and now I was feeling normal. Finally, it’s not Pune if people aren’t rude to you!

Sessions were nice but technical glitches like poor audio, quite dull LCD projection played a major spoilsport. The post lunch sessions by Dhaval Trivedi on Geolocation API and Vishal Parpia on Multimedia Kit were the highlights of the session, and IE bashing did happen inspite of MS being the platinum sponsor for the event. Not to forget, Ravi handled the event nicely and sprinkled hell lot of fun and laughter when required.

The organisation is really worth appreciating. I might not have attended many such events but I guess this was a Community event in true sense. Community was involved in suggesting speakers, adding content of their choice and that is what I liked about HasGeek. Hope they come up with many more such events in future.