Facts do matter !!!

Before I go on to tell you story of yatra..here are some facts which I think you should go through because I'll be using some terms in the coming posts which have great potential of not making sense to you if you haven't read this post :) so here it goes..

Yatri - The word we love to be addressed with :) :) :) gives immense pleasure you know..so a yatri is a person who has joined the yatra as a participant and is 20-25 years old.

Facilitator - A facilitator is a person above 25 who manages 5-6 yatris but is more or less like a yatri..no hierarchical differences I mean :)

Cohort - A cohort is made up of 6-7 people who live together in a compartment and belong to the same 'Group'. In each cohort (mostly) there is one facilitator and rest of the people are yatris.

Group - A group is made of up 3 cohorts - 2 male cohorts and one female cohort (my group being an exception as we were made up of 2 female cohorts and one male cohort :D ). Yatris on train were divide into group from A-S.

Role model - Role models are the reason we are on train. Role models are the people (the unsung heroes as we call them) behind social/business enterprises that we'll go to visit during our yatra.

Chair Car Session - We were always busy during yatra even when on train. Our train had two AC Chair Cars (one brown and other one blue) with capacity of 100 each. Different sessions( For example on Venture Capital) and presentations (that each group was required to make on different role model after visiting and studying them) were held in these cars. Both the cars had audio-video system to enable interaction between them. One thing to mention here is that the presenter or the speaker was usually in the brown AC chair car.

Compartment session - Now usually two kinds of sessions were held in train - AC chair car session and compartment session. As I told earlier that only half the number of groups (approx 200 yatris) could attend an AC chair car session at a time, the rest were busy in their compartment session where in all the group members collected either in girls' bogie or boys' bogie. The group members decided what they would in the session.

Branding Team - Whenever we reached a destination, we would go to visit Role model by buses. Doing branding of buses meant putting up banners on 3 sides of the buses. Branding team was made up of the yatris who volunteered.

Crowd Management Team - On an average we had 10 buses at every destination to take us to the site and parking of 10 buses requires a good amount of space, which was usually far away from the platform. Crowd management team was basically to show the way to buses to yatris. Braodly speaking the team was responsible that 'all' yatris reach the site and come back to train safely.

Organising Team - Organising team comprised of members of Jagriti Yatra team and some 2008 Yatris who looked after operations.

Announcing System - Aaha! A very interesting part. The train had speakers in all its bogies connected to a central control room. This announcing system was used for various purpose for example - Wake up call, to announce lunch & dinner, chair car sessions and so on.

Cyber cafe - Surprised eh? Yes we had a cyber cafe on train for avid bloggers. Yatris had to book the slots to use the service :)

CNBC Panel Discussion - We had 6 CNBC Panel Discussion at 6 destinations out of 13 that we visited. CNBC panel discussion had a certain topic related to entrepreneurship to be discussed by the accordingly chosen and invited panelists. Discussions were hosted by a CNBC anchor. These panel discussions were broadcasted on CNBC TV18 and CNBC Awaaz after yatra.

Umm..can't think of any other jargon as of now. I'll update if I have any other thing to add. For now wait for my next post :)

Break time ;)

Due to a little busy schedule these days I'm unable to publish my next blog. Actually I can publish it but I would rather prefer to maintain the continuity once I start again. Thank you for your patience :). Do come back :)