River Rafting In Rishikesh

It was a sudden decision by boys on the 9^th floor to go for an adventure … After a long debate freezing on ‘River Rafting in Rishikesh’ was decided … dates were finalized and then postponed … thrice … and finally one fine day we all gathered at 10:00 pm here in Tolstoy House & boarded the bus to “Camp Wonderlust”, Rishikesh ...the rest of the story follows … pictorially.

Our Journey for the great adventure began in a high spirit (Hic!)

We started at 11:00 pm

 

A Mid way stopover for mid night meal …..Delicious Aloo Parantha’s and Special Chai!

We reached our destination at 5:30 am…. But could only locate the sign board of our camp! Airtel did not buzz at this spot and we all were in a fix.

Then… some of our daredevils receded in pitch dark to an unknown Pagdandi going down the hills to locate our camp & were lucky to find the camp by the side of a beautiful beach!  But these Buggers forgot to intimate us who were waiting for some news amidst the bone chilling wind.

We were worried...And then suddenly Shamim shouted “Hey I have two dandi’s of signal on my vodaphone….we called one of our daredevils and he replied “Hey guy’s we found the camp & it’s so beautiful down here…. come down you all and don’t forget to get our luggage (Grrrr!)

 

Anyway ….it was a real site as we came down almost 700 meters on a zig zag track with extra luggage….

Beach Volley  ball at 7:00am was great experience!!

A hot cup of Masala Chai as a welcome drink was really refreshing.

At 10:am we climbed-up 700 meters (no luggage this time..Luckily!) and boarded our bus and went to the starting point of our rafting adventure called ….Marine drive. All looked damn sporty in the rafting gears…

It was a 25 km long journey in the great Ganges…..we had to take two rafts….to face the 12 great Rapids…..4 of these were really challenging!

It was a real fun!!

Splashhhh while on the raft….. When guys were told that they are in the middle of a depth of 150 feet deep river Ganges…  Everyone jumped back to the raft!!

There was a mid way halt ….this was a crowded spot with many other rafters taking a break for a 20 feet deep jump in to water….three of our teams members Vikram, Deepak & Ankit took the jump….

Camp fire and some ghost stories were on menu at the night.

Believe me….food at the camp was great!!

And the fire burnt till 2 am in the night despite the govt’s order to end it by 12 am....

Next day morning too, was great!

It was all on the rocks!

And the guy’s got the time to show off during the open bath at the camp beach…..

This camping proved to be a good team bonding exercise…………..

Some Great Poses…..

We all looked Great!

Time to set back home…..

Mid way Ganna break ……inspired by Rajiv was a great fun…..

On the way back the adventure showed ………………

It was a beautiful landscape at the Moolchands Resort near Khatauli …..An ideal place for meals on the way back….

We will go there again!

Christmas Party on 24th December 2010

We decided to say goodbye to 2010, and celebrate Christmas in style with Champagne, a Christmas Concert, a delicious Chrsitmas Cake and lots of fun and laughter!

Here are some pics of the time well spend:

Many Thanks

The Marketing Team

The very first Baby Shower in T & F India

The marketing department threw a ‘Baby Shower’ for Priya Mishra in our new office on the 7th floor. It was an all-girls event, and we had great fun. Priya is due for her date any time now and we thought of sending her off  in true T & F style!!

We played 2 games, where Aastha Sharma and Jubi barkoti were winners. The games were to guess Priya’s tummy size and to name as many baby items as one could think of.

Girls enjoying Gajar Ka Halwa!!

We also served Gajar Ka Halwa to all the ladies. Everyone gave a spoonful to Priya and wishes her all the best for her delivery and child birth. Everyone brought small gifts for the baby. It was great fun and a community endeavour. There was fun, laughter, girls bonding and gelling together.
The very first ‘All Women’ get together of T & F India.

All the best to Priya,

We wish you luck, we wish you Joy,
We wish you have a baby boy,
and when his hair begins to curl,
I wish you have a baby girl!!


Thanks



The Marketing Team

Facebook takes graphic look at friendship

There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven't yet met. --William Butler Yeats

Interesting News: 

http://www.dailygood.org/more.php?n=4373

With 500 million users, Facebook is as big as the population of the European Union. So a Facebook intern has devised a visual way to interpret at least one aspect of all the potential data in so many users: "the locality of friendship."
Paul Butler, an intern on Facebook’s data infrastructure engineering team, took it upon himself to use R, an open-source environment for statistical computing and graphics. He explained his jumping point this way:
I was interested in seeing how geography and political borders affected where people lived relative to their friends. I wanted a visualization that would show which cities had a lot of friendships between them. I began by taking a sample of about ten million pairs of friends from Apache Hive, our data warehouse. I combined that data with each user's current city and summed the number of friends between each pair of cities. Then I merged the data with the longitude and latitude of each city.
Butler plotted points at some of the latitude and longitude coordinates and came up with a rough outline of the world. He plotted lines between the points. A "big white blob" appeared in the center of his map, and while some of the outer edges shared a vague resemblance to continents, it soon became apparent that he had "too much data to get interesting results just by drawing lines." Other graphing techniques also went down the drain: semi-transparent lines, too many shades of color.
He explains how he reached his desired effect:
I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. I used a color ramp from black to blue to white, with each line's color depending on its weight. I also transformed some of the lines to wrap around the image, rather than spanning more than halfway around the world.
The desired effect: No longer a blob, but this detailed map of the world seen above, including continents and some borders. Butler couldn't help but be effusively sentimental about what he saw.
What really struck me, though, was knowing that the lines didn't represent coasts or rivers or political borders, but real human relationships. Each line might represent a friendship made while travelling, a family member abroad, or an old college friend pulled away by the various forces of life.
Butler replaced the lines with circle arcs, which are the shortest routes between two points on the Earth.
I still can't wrap my head around all this, but the image is a gorgeous rendering of one way Facebook interprets friendships: points of light. That, I can definitely understand and agree with.
Or, the way Butler sees it: "It's not just a pretty picture, it's a reaffirmation of the impact we have in connecting people, even across oceans and borders."


What's it mean to you?




Shafina