In continuation to our last post, we landed at Hyderabad on the evening of 4th of April 2010. We were picked up at the airport by a driver friend of mine who was also surprisingly my official driver during my stint in CISF as Assistant Commandant way back in the year 2001. What a small world, this guy was back in my alma mater on deputation and was deputed to pick us up at the airport. I was a bachelor back then in 2001, and now he was driving us couple.
We reached the academy by 9 pm and went straight to the Mess, where I would be staying for the coming 6 weeks of training. I was welcomed by a bunch of the most mischievous of my batchmates, just outside the mess and it was a welcome I was most dreading. They huddled round me and yelled out to the others to come and see, just how much i had changed since training and what they were pointing at was my hard earned waistline and chubby cheeks. I managed to escape from those clutches quickly, introduced Deepu to them and rushed to my room. After a while, Deepu left for home in Dilsukhnagar and i continued my training at the Academy. Home and Academy were about 20 kms away. On weekdays Deepu would come to the Academy in the evenings and we'd go to the gym or the swimming pool, and on the Weekends, I would go home and we would spend the days shopping, going to the movies, dinners etc.
The six weeks that I was at the academy, I spent most of the mornings and evening at either the Gym, Badminton courts, Tennis courts or the swimming pool. I kept cutting down on diet too and by the end of the six weeks I had nearly lost about 6 kilos of weight. Not a bad achievement taking into account all those dinners and parties during the weekends. The working hours between 9.30 in the morning to 5 in the evening were a real drab. We'd have classes at the Andhra Pradesh Bhavan, a nice cozy hall to take a good nap after a nice morning workout. Nevertheless few of the talks were real interesting especially two that I can make a mention of are, Anton Musgrave on 'Lessons from the future' and the one by Sudhanshu Phalsule on Leadership. The rest were just fillers. We did have some exposure at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad and it was quite interesting. We kept having weekly assessment tests and one final assessment exam. The most dreaded was the Theme Paper to be presented on the final day of the Indian leg of the course. Surprisingly enough, the paper that I prepared got selected to the final 10, and I was supposed to give a 15 minutes presentation on it on the final day. the topper among the 10 would get selected for a scholarship for a PhD at the Charles Sturt University, Australia. So I went on to prepare a very elaborate presentation, paying little attention to the time it took to present. The D-Day did arrive and I started the presentation to the mounting expectations of by friends seated behind. It was reagarding the 'Developing cocktail of Communalism, Organised Crime and Terrorism in Mangalore' ,the district where I was serving. An interesting topic that it was, people kept waiting to hear more and more on it, but little did I realise that I had gobbled up the 15 minutes given in just introducing the conundrum of Mangalore. The warning bell rang, the final bell rang and I still didnt realise that my time was over and I had to leave. It was a terrible disappointment because of my own stupidity and as i walked back across the hall I could see those dropped jaws trying to console me.
That was the end of the Indian leg or rather the Hyderabad leg of the training. The next two weeks would be in Australia, one week at Canberra and another at Sydney. The Hyderabad part went off well. My main intension was weight reduction and surprisingly enough I did pretty well academically as well. The best part of the entire leg offcourse was the quality time me and Deepu spent throughout that period, be it at home, academy or just exploring the city. The last week of our stay in Hyderabad we spent most of the time planning the Australia trip, the Visas, money exchange, buying phone sim cards, shopping, packing etc. Finally we were to leave to Sydney Australia by the Thai airways flight from Hyderabad via Bangkok on the 14th of May 2010.
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