Fully prepared to sweat it out, we went to the venue and were surprised to see the place.  It was in an almost secluded place.  The building was a blend of modern and ethnic architecture with a very big garden which had soft green grass, a pond with lotus blooming, shrubs with beautiful exotic flowers…. Very much like scenery straight out of a picture calendar!

No, it was not a resort but an institute meant for training purposes. 

Even the accommodation was good.

As soon as we reached there, we got down to work. The participants were from different places of the state. 

Even the evenings were booked for the sessions till dinner time.  But we had other plans… we had seen the Table tennis table in the hall next to our room on the first floor! And all the participants were allotted rooms in the ground floor.  So we gave them assignment for the evening and began playing TT.  The last time we had played the game was when we were in our schools and colleges.  Like naughty teenagers, we grabbed the racquets in glee and began the game.  And continued it even after supper till we were too tired to take even a step.  But our enthusiasm was at its peak.  After retiring to our rooms, we played the movie ‘Chak de India’ though it was quite late and we had to be up early for the next day!  Actually we had to plan for the next day!

The next day went well because we had arranged for a resource person to take care of the session who kept us occupied for the whole day with his ‘gyan’.  His ‘gyan’ had all our participants so engrossed that they did not want it to end.  And to top it, the resource person was a drool dude! Hahaha so most of them were drooling over him, including us.  Incidentally all our participants were women!!!

After the ‘gyan’ session, we played a movie for the participants titled ‘Ankur’ which had lots of underlying messages in it.  A brilliant movie by Shyam Benegal, with Shabana Azmi, Anant Nag as the cast.  None of us had seen it before. 

The same thing followed after supper this evening of the second day too.  Lots of table tennis.  But this time we had company!  A student who was at the training institute and was residing on the second floor came down for water and stopped by to watch four crazy women playing table tennis in the middle of the night!  When we invited him, he eagerly joined us.  And boy was he good at the game!  Though it was past his bedtime, he kept on playing with us.  It was as if the young man did not want to miss out on the fun.  He was actually teaching us the shots and the chops.  Finally all our energies drained, we went back to our rooms but once back in our rooms, we began our session of jokes and more laughter.  All recollecting the behavior of the young man who was kind of awed by one of our sexy colleague who was wearing shorts!!! 

Finally we dozed off.  The next afternoon we left the place after first packing off all our participants and later having a last game of TT!  The taxi came to take us back to our workplace.  But there was still some hangover of all the fun we had… so we stopped at an ice cream parlour and had ice creams.

And we realized that we had more fun here than we would have had back home during the weekend!  We had started grumbling that when the whole world is enjoying their weekend, here we were slogging it.  But this weekend turned out to be great!

All the fresh air, plenty of running about for the game and lots of laughter had done us so much of good!!!

And we began looking forward to the next month’s weekend programme we have scheduled.