Vikarabad Trails

Start of the journey

The’ Deccan Trails’ our first stop in our road, which was CAS (creativity action service) and this road had the destination of the IB core requirements. So in essence whether we liked it or not, all of us had to be a part of it.

The camp site was located on top of a hill and about 2 hours away from school, that doesn’t sound as exciting I know. But 2 days in absolute serenity, with green beauty covering us really takes away that fact. Being in the school for 2 years, it was hard to get accustomed to the many new faces, this trip did serve the purpose of gaining CAS points but it did have a deeper and far more important reason which was bonding and getting to know our new classmates and friends. For this we undertook several challenges and team activities that would require us to exploit the advantages of people we didn’t know and work in everybody’s comfort zone. This of course led us to understand each other.

‘Balancing the board’ was the first task assigned to us after being split into groups/teams. It involved a great deal of communication and more importantly the coordination. The greater challenge here was that we worked with unfamiliar but new classmates, so it was easy for everyone to just shout and blame every other person for a group mistake. However there was an incentive as the activity was converted into a race, so differences aside, each and every group member worked to being more collaborative and tried to put in effective work. With the goal of reaching the finish line as quick as possible. There are two major things I learnt from this one, of course being that we must understand our partners in order complete a task and the second, human nature has been built in such a way that even though we may think team building and taking an initiative might be ‘lame’ in the end when there is an incentive to win, everybody does what they have to in order to win. Therefore there is no such label as ‘a cool thing’.

Our next task was rock climbing, which frankly was an embarrassment for me. As muscular as I may feel I am proud to say that I failed this task. However the crowning achievement for me here was that even though I knew to some extent that physically I had been lazy the past few months and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to complete it. My mind did not let me give up, I did manage to almost reach the top and it was solely due to will power. Had it not been for the will power I know I wouldn’t have even tried.

There we a bunch of other activities like, flying fox and the Burma bridge. But there are two activities that in my head stand out in terms of enjoyment and in terms of something new to learn. They were, treasure hunt and to compose our own music and present it. The latter was of course a tough one as none of my team members were musicians. The thing to watch out for in this activity and coincidentally in treasure hunt as well was that, we had to be observant and notice the minute details around us. I did try and put in all my focus into finding anything that would work be it a twig or a utensil.  Sid, one of my closest friends figured out a way to bring in different tunes by filling in the glasses with different levels of water and striking them with variety of forces. This act of creativity and interest led us to win the event. What I learnt from this was, creativity in our own field on interest is a necessity to succeed and more importantly to perform the task with pleasure and happiness.

The treasure hunt, as mentioned earlier managed to groom similar qualities in us except that this time we had to be quick in observing and registering. Cheating may have been acceptable here as long as we didn’t get caught (we didn’t.)

In the end, all of our differences were accepted by one another and at the end of the trip we came together as a class by understanding each other’s strengths and weaknesses.