OCTAVIANS have a gala time at ‘Creat-e-witty’ work-shop

Students at OCTAVE got a refreshing break from their studies recently and got an opportunity to indulge in some interesting outdoor activities. The two-day outbound activity, which included creativity and team skills’ work-shop, was held at ‘Maitraban’, situated at the banks of lake Zilpi on the outskirts of Nagpur city.

DAY ONE

The first day was occupied by the creativity work-shop. It was a fun filled day with OCTAVIANS running their grey cells to come up with witty answers to hypothetical situations. Most popular of them was ‘the loss of gravity and its effect on our daily life’. Gauraw’s answer invited the maximum laughter and applause when he quipped, “the phrase, ‘love is in the air’ would become practically possible. “ Some other funny thoughts included, “The education minister will have to skip the chapter on ‘Gravity’ from the syllabus,” from Piyush J and “Sir Issac Newton wouldn’t be famous”, by Saurabh.

Another activity was that of naming a product, person and a process which is creative and students came up with brilliant answers having names of everyone and everything famous. However, it was an eye opener as Mr. Milind Apte, our faculty and a psychologist, gave an example of a ‘potter’ and a ‘mother’ as a creative person. His view, that, “we always think of a renowned figure when thinking of a creative person, but turn a blind eye to ordinary people surrounding us who too are highly creative in their life”, was agreed and appreciated by everybody.

Some more activities followed in the day, like ‘co-relating two words random words and making a meaningful sentence out of them’ and review of short movie ‘Highland Road’ directed by Nikunj Agrawal, a III year engineering student.

It was time for some physical exercise after playing enough mind games and students were quickly divided into five groups and asked to collect everything that looked like garbage around the campus. OCTAVIANS were again running their brains as they were asked to create something meaningful out of that garbage!

The groups came out with themes on a village, city, war front, scarecrow, and potty paradise!

DAY TWO

The next day began with a drawing activity. It was a pleasant atmosphere and ‘Maitraban’ looked its scenic best in morning hours. A great location, to sit and ponder how the beautiful landscape will look like on paper.

It was time for some adventure camping after the breakfast, which everyone was looking forward to.

Wall climbing proved out to be the toughest one as few could actually climb till the top and flash victory signs. ‘Cobweb’ was a great team activity where the entire team had to make a strategy to move from one side of the web to the other and only one person going through one gap at a time and only once. No touching the web or your team will have to start all over again!

There were some prizes up for grabs at the end of the day and that included, ‘most creative person’ (Shweta Madan, Gauraw Ganvir, Chetan Gite, Tejaswini Giripunje) and some more for taking initiatives, participation, co-operation, etc.

All in all the two days were fun filled and a welcome break from routine classroom work.

• By Aditi Deodhar