India MVP - Advocates Day
This was a cool event organized by Microsoft India for all India MVP's on the 8th and 9th of November. The goal of this meet was to get all the MVP's together so that we could get to know each other and also have some fun!! The agenda was to meet at a local hotel (called Taj West End) and then have some sessions and skills workshop. Post this, we were to visit the new Microsoft facility and meet with Lauri Moore (VP of Support Services, the group that also runs the MVP program). After this official work, we were to go to a place outside of Bangalore and have some fun and this was the best part!
The first day went off quite well and we had some presentation and communication skills workshops. These workshops had us doing some collaborative work and after this we went off to the new facility. The meeting with Laurie Moore went on quite well and although she was hard-pressed for time, she was able to answer quite a lot of questions. Some of the core areas pointed were the inability to touch base with MS folks at Redmond and access to programs that happen in the US at a much earlier phase than in India. Hopefully these issues should be resolved soon.
The break-out place for the next day was called wonder valley, which was situated about 30-40 kms away from Bangalore. Its about 300 acres of forest land in which adventure sports are normally held. We had fun doing rappling (rock climbing), raft building and actually going on it and high wire walking. Towards the end, each one of us was busted and tired and waiting to return home.
Overall, this was a well deserved break and also was a great chance to meet with all the MVP's and know their interests and areas. Hopefully, more such programs will be had in the future.