Pariksha

Remember that feeling when you last walked of the examination hall.

Remember guessing the questions that would follow before the paper started.

Your knowledge about the subject was inversely proportional to the sleep you gained previous night.

Everything followed all these years and we just wished exams to always get over but never to start.

Ever remember the classes?

And I always wondered what separates Pariksha & Pratiksha.

Imagine when Guru Dronacharya was teaching Arjun the art of archery, several classes about wind velocity, air turbulence, aerodynamics, elasticity, force and so on would have followed and still Arjun wouldn’t have been as great an archer as he was if he wouldn’t have learnt the application of all the subjects together.

What I am concluding is that all the subjects resemble pearls, but it’s the necklace that sells.

Having understood the above, I realized that Takshshila would not be what we had dreamt of until we enhance our Gyankosh with Pariksha, because that’s where you realize that it’s not just the rubber that hits the road, but the whole bloody car.

& hence Pariksha came to existence.

PARIKSHA signifies an exam but indeed of a different kind.

The Mauryans at Takshshila had underwent a few training programs in their initial span of 10 days at Gyankosh. They also worked hard and completed their respective assignments. The iterations followed and so did the scores.

But somewhere there was a feeling of innovating, creating and growing together missing.

That’s when Chanakya helped.

“Before you start some work, always ask yourself three questions – Why am I doing it, What the results might be and Will I be successful. Only when you think deeply and find satisfactory answers to these questions, go ahead.”  Chanakya

Our aim is not just to learn every thing in bits and pieces but also to implement, understand and provide a real life experience.

So we introduced Pariksha to the Mauryans to implement their Learning and the outcome of it would be a product as well.

Little realization and this sounded indeed fun as with basic knowledge of Linux, Operating System and Java, one can actually create a product, that too in a short span – say 5 hours or 300 minutes – less than what we spent watching Gangs of Wasseypur – both parts.

A little prep behind the scenes and we were ready to explore it with the Mauryans in small teams. Taken aback initially, the Mauryans took the challenge of delivering the Monitoring Tool within 5 hours.

With a 5 member team and a total of 25 hours at disposal, the Herculean task began.

And no task achieves completion until it’s planned like a winner task.

Stage 1 – Planning

1. Mind share of each while preparing a mental model
2. Prepare a design and flow of execution
3. Identification of tasks
4. Distribution of Task
5. Adding of checkpoints to measure the progress
6. Identify what are the grey areas which will be requiring the exploration

Stage 2 – Execution

1. Coding
2. Unit Testing
3. Integrating
4. Demo

In their different bays, each team looked like planning to create nothing less than a masterpiece. Everyone looked fidgety and restlessness was evident.

For marginally easing the task, we gave them 3 sheets.

1. Design/Flow
2. Task Distribution
3. Milestones

This was to ensure that the basic path and approach remains the same and understanding that creating a product is much more than just coding. Facilitating this by asking them the right questions & helping them realize where they have left a gap.

On the face of this entire situation, it looked as if we came out with a plan to impart Gyaan, but the experience we seem to have gained through this is in itself a new learning for us.

No sooner had the design was frozen that they divided the task among themselves and started implementing what they had planned.

This was the exciting part.

Murphy’s Law finds its application in all scenarios.

Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

But like in a Pariksha, or an examination hall, you are all by yourself and external help can only tease you.

Having faced several issues, the team sorted every bit on its own, which only raised the self-confidence bar.

1 thing – The feeling of competition can not be replaced by anything.

It is only this feeling that ensures I push myself to the next mile when i have already planned to give up.

The learning of the entire exercise:

1. Extensibility in any design.
2. Usability
3. Understanding what you are delivering.

Obviously, one team emerged as winners of Pariksha-1 but it was actually a win win situation for me as what needed to be conveyed was conveyed in a healthy, practical and an exciting way.