It all began with a small “creative” idea to organize a Secret Santa system in the office. Stephen however chose to interpret this idea as me organizing a full-on Christmas party (which I had no problem with, since I love making lists and arranging stuff!!!).

The original plan was to just distribute gifts. Imagine deciding what to give 60 people and shopping for everything in just one weekend!! That, I would have to say was probably the most challenging part of the entire party plan!! Deciding on what to get the girls was relatively easy, but I had an especially bad time with the guys’ gifts. Finally I settled on a few small things and went off to shop for both the gifts and the party supplies.

The next looming task was the wrapping of all the 60 gifts! Now with just one day of the weekend and a few weekdays left, this was a task of sheer time management and determination! In general I do enjoy wrapping gifts, but it’s an entirely different thing liking to wrap a birthday gift or two and having to wrap an unending pile of office Christmas gifts!! But once I got into the rhythm of the process, it went quicker than I expected. I would like to brag (don’t know if everyone will think it’s deserved or not, but I did!), that on the second day of wrapping, I was doing 12 guys’ gifts in 30 min!
I would also like to point out that during all the deciding, shopping and wrapping of the gifts, I was doing Christmas decorations at home too! By the time I had 2 dozen gifts wrapped, the only decorations up at home was the tree, and this was probably the 17th or 18th of December already! It was now a real race against the clock!!

Finally on the 20th, I had all the gifts wrapped and neatly stacked. I have to say they looked really pretty, all twinkling red and silver in the glow of my Christmas tree lights! Writing that now, I wish I’d taken pictures, but there’s always next year, what say Sir?!
Then came the Friday the 21st, D-Day, the day when I’d find out if all my hard work would pay off and we’d have a great party! Most of the morning was spent putting the finishing touches to the decorations. By the afternoon, all the snacks had been ordered and we were finally ready to roll!! Michael came to inspect my arrangements and didn’t seem entirely thrilled with my choice of gifts, and just for that, he’s on the planning committee for next year!! Gifts and entertainment, and I shall supervise!!

5:00 p.m. and the A Wing pantry looked fully stocked with all the snacks, delivered and lined up ready to tuck into. 5:30 and people began to slowly trickle into the A Wing, inspecting all the proceedings. When everyone was finally there, we started with the long awaited results of the WA- Sholay poll. Shouts and screams with guesses for the winners filled the conference room, everyone was most enthusiastic!! All the winners, seemed quite satisfied with their prizes, whether or not they had expected to win!! Then were the gifts, alphabetically announced and claimed. And finally, what everyone must have been waiting for, the snacks!!

We banned entry to the pantry, except for those who were serving, just to make sure everyone got an equal share; unlike the goings-on at most of the project meets!! But Mahesh and crew decided to infiltrate the snacks, but we managed to throw them out and restore order to the pantry!!!

Big thanks go out to all the girls and Claudian, who made the service of snacks move like a well-oiled machine!

That was the end of a very satisfying mission. But as relieved as I was that it had been successfully accomplished, I felt a void in what had become my daily routine, buying, wrapping, planning and so on!!!

The purpose of the Vikramshila project was to create an application that would handle and organize the educational and health records of students from a school run by the NGO, Dasra.

We decided that the technology we would use would be core Java and Swings and as the database, an Excel sheet. POI seemed like a logical approach, so that the user’s machine could use the application independently of Microsoft Office. The main idea of the project was to create a report generation tool, which would create a variety of reports from a suitable Excel sheet.

The reports we designed were:

1. Full Child Report:

On selection of a particular child, it displays all the information for that child.

This information includes personal, scholastic & non-scholastic assessment, attendance and family statistics.

2. Scholastic & Non-Scholastic Report

Shows assessments for students’ performance in each scholastic or non-scholastic subject.

Shows the effect of language study on other subjects.

Shows the effect of teaching non-scholastic subjects on scholastic subject results.

This report can also be viewed as a break-up according to religion & monthly family income.

3. Progress vs. Background Report

Shows scholastic & non-scholastic results and assessments for each child.

Can also be viewed as a break-up according to religion, monthly family income & parents’ occupation.

4. Children in family vs. School going Children Report

Shows the number of children in each family and the corresponding number of school going children.

5. Monthly Attendance Report

Shows month wise break-up of students’ attendance.

Can also be viewed as a break-up according to religion & monthly family income.

6. Religious and Economic Report

Shows break-up of students according to religion and also according to monthly family income.

Since we use an Excel sheet as a source of input, we have configured the application such that the user can choose which Excel sheet will be the input. If the Excel sheet has all the required columns, the application will read from this sheet and generate the reports.

All in all, working on this project was an entirely new and exhilarating experience, both for the level of tasks I was assigned as well as for the contents of the project.