All work and no play makes anyone quite dull, so inspite of the hectic schedules and my Senior project manager’s “warnings” to not indulge in cultural activities, keeping in mind the release deadlines, I did take part in a couple of things during the diwali cultural fest held at office (two weeks back). There’s usually a floor decoration competition here plus rangoli competition. Hard work pays (only where it doesnt really matter). My floor came first in the floor decoration competition and my rangoli came 2nd out of 13 teams. Here is a pic.

The theme was “good over evil”. Lord Ram is shown killing Ravanna, who`s a brahmin. The brahmin is a Shiv devotee and this is shown with the third eye and Shiv Tikka. The brahmin being Ravanna is depicted in his shadow with 10 heads. We (3 more ppl besides me) used rice (which we painted with water colours), pulses, rangoli colours, maida (fine flour), gold dust, soil, coloured sparkles, bit of thermocol etc. For Lord Ram`s clothes, we used satin, stuffed cotton under it and stuck the cloth to the floor, to give a 3D look. In the end it was highlighted with sparkles, to give it a royal appearance. Coloured sparkles were also put in other parts of the rangoli as well. When the spotlights were switched on, they added to the beauty of the rangoli. I personally liked the bright contrast which came up in the sun behind Lord Ram (he being a suryavanshi), though the picture doesn’t really show it well. Here’s another pic with just that part of the rangoli covered.