Chennai Blogger Meet

A lazy Sunday started with a message from my cousin, Gopi that he was visiting us. Great! Now there is ritual in our place. When someone announces his/her arrival, we start cleaning our place. Thats when we actually clean our home! And if someone comes unannounced, its at their own risk! So a couple of hours of cleaning and it was already 1 pm. Gopi came and we soon left for Citi Centre. An hour at Landmark and about half an hour at Coffee Day later, I started. I picked up Shillika on the way to the Hotel. Update: The next few lines were removed due to requests by the person concerned.

We arrived at Hotel Dee Cee Manor a few minutes past four. We walked in to find a few Photowalkers, Varun, Arvind aka Pseudonym, Sudhamshu already there. Then Chandru, Vatsan, Sandhya and Dhruva walked in. The first half of the proceedings was boring, esp the introduction part and the ‘one minute of fame’ though the later saw lot of wisecracks from the audience. Then it was dinner time and time to network. Had a chat with Kribs about podcasting. Met interesting people like Joel, Naveen, Rohit and Jackie. At one point of time, I even cursed Gapp as I found myself sitting between X and Y!

It was then the jigs round where the organizers read out random comments from random blogs and the blog owner does a jig. it was actually funny to see bloggers of all shapes and sizes doing jigs! Then there was a skit by The Rebelz which had the audience in splits with their jabs at people ranging from Balaiyah to Vijay Mallya. Then there was the skit by the Indibloggers Team. At the last was the occasion everyone was waiting for - the T Shirts!

Most of the people had left by then and the remaining people had a quick snap with a few of the organizers. Most of the bloggers who attended the meet found the proceedings boring and this is probably because Chennai has seen lots of such events like BarCamp, BlogCamp and of course the Chennai Photowalk where most of the people are bloggers! Still, the IndiBloggers Team deserves a pat on the back for organising such an event.

From left (clockwise) Dont know the first two peeps’ name, Arvind, Myself, Varun, Joel, Naveen (the guy who got owned last week!) Rohit, Murali, Jackie (she is Naveen’s owner!) Sandhya Rajan and the girl whose name also i dont know.

We then pushed Rohit’s car whose front wheel was stuck in the parking lot and it was then the drive to the deserted Marina beach with Pseudonym where we spent around 20 minutes before heading back home.

Lessons I learnt today:

1) Networking in Chennai means meeting the same people again and again as the same folks turn up for all meets.

2) In Chennai, girls blog; babes dont!

3) Never offer to pick up any girl you know up! Especially, if she is doing third year VissCom in MOP Vaishnav College!

Update at 6:10, 9th June: More posts about the event can be read here.