Nice Meet. Nicer Meeting People.

The sky was overast but the rain thankfully played truant. Amethyst has become even more beautiful. They had extended the cafe to the open garden area but done a good job without cutting any trees and camouflaging it with plans to give it feel of privacy.

As with all previous meets, the first 15 minutes had the awkward feel. Most people were new to each other. People would walk to me to ask about the agenda. The beauty of the meet is, there’s no agenda. It’s a forum for folks to network and meet up.

We decided to push the chairs away so it enables people to move around and interact with each other. That worked. Within a short while, everyone started to mingle freely. People started forming small groups and they floated around to other groups, catching up on intros and myriad topics.

To easen up the ordering, pretty much everyone had Cafe latte barring an occassional French Press or Cold Coffee. My daughter’s chess board acted as the money collected. The board was laid on a table and people placed their contributions there and picked up their change. The idea was inspired by a tea shop owner in Calcutta.

The meeting went on for over two and half hours. It would have gone even further had the stewards not started dropping strong hints of closing hours. It was an evening well spent.

You can find the photos at Ganesh’s site. Sophie shot some pics too which will be online soon. Ravi Kumar made fantastic name tags which gave a very organized feel to the entire meet. Praveen Menon of Indian Express has done a small report on the meet in today’s paper.