Barcamp Bangalore 6 – My Best BarCamp Ever!

I wasn’t around when the BCB6 planning started. I was enjoying my vacation in Bhopal. I came back to Bangalore a week or so before BCB6 and found little work to do in the organizing front. There was an amazing response in the call for volunteers and 56 people volunteered. This was a major breakthrough compared to previous Barcamps.

I initiated a couple of sessions in BCB6. The first one was on Startup Pains. It was inspired primarily to identify authentic issues that I could take up as a KickStart.in initiative and do my bit towards making Bangalore a heaven for startups. It was led primarily by Prof Suresh. He brought in some presentations and put in a lot of facts in the picture. We got some 5 pain points. 4 of which we had compiled before. The solutions too were something in lines of what we had thought of earlier.

Chetna forced me to sit down with her for her session on Star Signs, astrology, palmistry etc. She chipped in my name and handwriting analysis as well. The session on Star Signs was informative, I figured out that a Star Sign is different from Sun Sign. And as expected there was a lot of debate. I asked if Rajiv, (the guy who was an armature palmist and who seemed to know the most about the topic) if he could tell 1 major incident from my past. If he could accurately say that, I would be a convert. He couldn’t but he did say a thing about creativity which I agree with.

Astrology got even more heated arguments.

Now my turn came to speak about Handwriting Analysis and I was already thinking like “what am I doing here?”. Anyways, I chose not to talk much. I offered to do a 2 line analysis of 10 people who volunteered. I’ll tell 2 things about each of them. If all of them found those two things to be their typical qualities then people could take Handwriting Analysis to be a Science and if it did not match, they could brand it a pseudo science or whatever. And there was only 1 line to read from. It was a gamble, the data was insufficient. But I thought it would be fun and took it on. Result: Out of the 20 or so handwritings that I analyzed, all agreed and only 1 disagreed with a thing I spoke on optimism. I don’t know what the others thought of HandwritingAnalysis though.

Shourya was at his cynical and logical best though! When I looked at a sample’s T bar and spoke a thing about enthusiasm, he commented immediately about the 2 exclamation marks that the sentence carried (something I hadn’t even noticed!!!).

But thats not what made it my best barcamp ever. I just loved the participation. For the first time, I didn’t go to the gates to tie the banners. And when Aditya and I went to the L Cluster after the feedback session to clean the place up, we were surprised to find that everything was spic and span!!! This kind of things happen when people take the event as their own. I guess in BCB6, the majority did take it that way!

I met a lot of amazing people as usual. It was just too good an experience to describe in words.