ACE 2008 – The Making

Ravi Mundoli

Asha – Hyderabad 

      At least one reason why ACE 2008 happened is possibly geological. It is conjectured that about 65 million years ago, something called the Deccan Traps explosion may have caused one of the largest extinctions recorded. What is known for sure is that it resulted in an outpouring of molten material that cooled and hardened into much of the rock of the Deccan Plateau.

      In some places, shaped by skilful hands and tools and guided by a surpassing artistic vision, the living rock turned into poetry in stone (Hampi, Mamallapuram). In others, they merely lay strewn across the land in all sorts of fantastic sizes and shapes, like the discarded toys of some giant infant. Even today, a short excursion into the countryside near the outskirts of Hyderabad will bring you face to face with these monstrosities.

      After lying undisturbed for millennia, the 20^th and 21^st centuries rolled in and changed all this. Global and local factors conspired to turn Hyderabad into one of India’s poster children for “growth” and “economic development”. The influx into the city of money and the people who made it was a harbinger of a real estate and construction boom. Land was gobbled up, and buildings sprung up in the unlikeliest places. In the morning you drove past a standing crop of paddy; in the evening the slab for the 4^th floor was being poured and the EMIs were also pouring in. Concrete needs stone, and stone is begat by rock, and it wasn’t long before the kind ministrations of the builders in town turned to the igneous offerings of the Deccan Traps.

      Quarries sprung up all around the outskirts of town, and the clink of hammer and chisel and the boom of dynamite replaced birdsong and the sound of wind in the leaves. The Yellammabanda area in the Kukatpally suburb of Hyderabad was generously endowed with rock and soon became home to frenetic quarrying.

      Quarries need quarry-workers, and since labour is such an expensive and highly prized commodity in India, the owners turned to machinery.

      Right. Needless to say, the cheapest way of converting rock into pebbles a thousand years ago was to employ people to hack at it, and being conscientious protectors of our heritage, we have continued this hoary tradition into the present age. The Yellammabanda quarries employ hundreds of labourers in this backbreaking “profession”.

      The Ramakrishna Upper Primary School (RUPS) was set up to try and make sure that the children of the quarry workers could possibly aspire to lives that were at least marginally better than what their parents have to endure. Time will tell whether it is successful in its mission.

      Asha-Hyderabad was a late entrant into this drama. When the chapter was established in 2003, like all Asha chapters we needed a project. And if the mountain will not come to Mohammad, Mohammad has to go to the mountain. Or quarry, as the case may be. When Asha-Hyderabad got involved with RUPS, the school suffered from a high dropout rate. The children who did attend weren’t at their playful and attentive best, and a health camp that we organized revealed that most of them were suffering from nutrition linked illnesses. And so it came to be, that the mid-day meal programme at RUPS became the Hyderabad chapter’s first real Asha project. The school administration helped us get started, a vendor was identified, and a helper to assist with serving the meal and cleaning was appointed.

      Anyone who has done fund raising for non-profits must be very aware that dollars, pounds and Euros don’t grow on the surrounding vegetation. Neither do rupees, as it turns out! Once we had committed to supporting the mid-day meal, we quickly had to rack our brains for finding out how the hell we were to continue the programme. We relied on individual donations and goodwill for the first couple of years, but it was in 2005 when the chapter had found its legs and had acquired a bunch of fairly regular volunteers who didn’t want to twiddle their thumbs, that the idea of doing a corporate quiz competition as a fund-raising event took root. Things moved fast, and before you could say “Sivasubramaniam Chandrasegarampillai”, the Asha for Children’s Education (ACE) Corporate Quiz was born.

      Thanks to the generous support of the International School of Business (ISB) who to our utter surprise and delight agreed lend us their superb auditorium for one afternoon every year without asking for anything in return, to the crazy quizmasters of Quizerati, and to tens of local and out of town companies who sponsored the geeks and trivia buffs from their ranks, ACE was off to a flying start.

      Preparations for ACE 2008 kicked off in earnest in January. Having pulled it off for 3 years in a row, we thought we had everything covered. Using space age, bleeding edge, state of the art technologies such as GMail, Excel and Yahoogroups, we thought we would be able to polish off one more instalment with little trouble.

      Initially, it was hard going. Leads led to precisely nowhere, calls weren’t returned, and a moderate sized black hole apparently made especially for us was diligently swallowing all our emails, apart from sucking up all our enthusiasm en passant. Gloom and despondency began to descend on the few of us who knew the state of affairs, even as the “veterans” put on a brave face so that the “newbies” wouldn’t lose heart.

      Luckily for us, from out of the blue came Phase Forward. They had just opened an office in Hyderabad and were looking for ways to get involved with the local community. We helped connect the dots. Phase Forward generously agreed to become a Platinum Sponsor for the quiz. If that wasn’t enough, quite unexpectedly, they decided to sponsor the mid-day meal programme for a whole year. Boy, were we thrilled (not to mention relieved!).

      As the date of the quiz drew near, other preparations were in full swing. PPTs were churned out, certificates were printed, trophies were ordered, and industrial quantities of chai were drunk in weekly meetings.

      The day of the quiz dawned per usual. What else could it have done? The volunteers sped off from various corners of the city to the lush ISB campus and we were there in time. To do pretty much nothing! The excellent facilities staff at ISB had already made the auditorium ready, all we had to do was hang up a couple of banners, set up a registration desk, and finish the vitally important task of finding lunch.

      The participants started trickling in over the course of the afternoon, all brimming with energy and ready to “slaughter” each other at the altar or knowledge. As Lewis Carroll said (even if it was about oysters),

                  Thick and fast they came at last,

                  And more and more and more.

      The kids from RUPS sang an invocation and off we went! The written preliminary round saw everyone chew the tips off their pens as they wrestled with such ponderous issues as what rock band gets its name from a book on thermonuclear war and what would your number be if you were sitting in the “Shakespeare seat” in an aircraft.

      During the break before the finals, the chapter coordinator quickly slipped in our usual song and dance about Asha, Asha-Hyderabad and RUPS, in the hopes of enticing more donors and volunteers. This was tremendously successful in rapidly putting everyone to sleep, and it took all the quizmasters’ horses (yes, that was a bit of a surprise) and all the quizmasters’ men to wake them up and keep them engrossed. The final was a smash hit thanks to a superb set of questions that were tantalizingly familiar and yet just hard enough to help everyone appreciate the skills of the teams on stage.

      When the curtain rang down, we ended with the practice we started in Version 1.0 of getting the RUPS students and not some hi-fi “chief guests” hand out the prizes. As the sun set we wended our way to the ISB canteen, tired but happy, a few of us already calculating our profit & loss statement for the event, everyone bubbling over with laughter and conversation and a deep desire for pastries, a feeling that any Asha volunteer around the world who has been part of a fund-raiser is intimately familiar with. We had done it again, even if it was by the skin of our teeth. The mid-day meal programme would continue, and so would Asha-Hyderabad.