OTNYathra Delhi Event Is Done….

Well, I just got back in my hotel room after some really REALLY good things! One, I got a chance to attend the sessions of the some of the biggest and the best names of the database world , Hans Forbrich, Lucas Jellema, Raj Mattamal, Murali Vallath and Edward Roske. Two, we all just had dinner just a while ago and three, well , it’s about me but anyways , my presentation went well! Sort of enough reasons right! And it all happened at the kick off of OTN Yathra at New Delhi!

I reached here at Delhi yesterday. Though Hans and I think Lucas were already there but I had to go for an official meeting and I started for that as  soon as I reached at the hotel-in about 15 minutes after reaching the hotel may be. That was not at Delhi but was at Noida so it took a lot of time in the cab to go there. The “meeting” turned out to be a tech interview of mine which the customer sort of wanted to do and though I was okay with it, I some how felt a little insulted when there were some questions which were really really simple and shouldn’t had been asked. And just to be fare, I think I did fumbled on question myself too. After about an hour, I was free and then it was the time to head back to the hotel and this time, it took much longer to do that because there was a lots of traffic on the road which wasn’t unusual but was very tiring. Anyways, when I checked in my room, I called up Hans to check about dinner and he mentioned that Lucas is also there and we are good to go. So three of us went to have dinner. We are right now in the hotel Country Inn which is at a very nice shopping mall Select City Walk(probably the best mall of New Delhi) so the idea was to see if there is some place interesting at the mall or near by where we could go and eat. After doing a little hunt and of course, asking people, we finally got at Punjabi Grill. It was expensive but the food was excellent. Since Hans and Lucas were absolutely fine with the North Indian cuisine, we ordered couple of items and believe me when I am saying this, the food was excellent! It was a great dinner in which besides the food, we all talked a lot. It was my first time to meet with Lucas( I had already met Hans and I shall write about it in another post) and he is just awesome! So witty, absolutely honest and rather simple person and just for the record, he is probably one of the best experts for the ADF technology in the world. After about 2.5 hours, we were finally back in the hotel and there we met Murali. Since I believe we all were tired and a quick cup of tea would had been great, we all went for it and we got a place on the roof top. It was my great honour to be there with all these great experts and now, since it was already late, we all headed to our rooms as we had to kick off the OTN Yathra’s first event which was happening at Gurgaon. It was going to be a long, tiring but exciting day and we needed some rest before it for sure!

The day started quite early for us as we left for the venue 7am, Hans, Lucas, Murali , Raj and me. It was a little difficult to find the place but we were there without being completely lost. We were expecting about 100 people who registered and about 74 showed up eventually. After the welcome note, it was Hans’s presentation which was the first one for me to attend and it was just superb! Not only Hans has immense technical knowledge, he has a very fine art of presenting the topic and making sure that his message goes to the delegates in an easy way. After Hans’s session, I picked up Raj’s APEX session. Though I knew about Raj that he is one of the foremost experts in the world about this technology, I never got a chance to see him presenting and boy, he is just amazing! Really really really passionate about this technology and loves to share his knowledge. The audience has no idea about APEX and he had another presentation made for the conference which he stopped and started out with a really basic yet interesting one which was about the introduction of the APEX along with demonstrations. If you haven’t seen him presenting, you won’t be able to guess it but he is just superb and swift that if you would miss out for a moment, it would take a while to catch up back with him. The session was so interesting and the delegates were so into it , it actually went about 30 minutes ahead of the schedule and because of that Murali did cancel his session. Murali and me did an open Q/A session and then we were off for the lunch break.

After the lunch break, it was Edward’s presentation followed by Hans’s double presentation of two hours which was really sad for me because my schedule got collided with his session. Yes. I did present too and to my surprise, there were few folks who did come to my session. In addition to the others, Lucas, Raj and later on even Murali also did join (which was really nerve cracking as he is The Man when it comes to RAC). But thank god that all went well and I got a great feedback about the presentation, both from the audience and also from Lucas and Murali which was VERY encouraging and relieving for me to hear!

Finally, it was the evening time and it was time to close the day which went really great! To my surprise and happiness, there was one, yes one person which did come from Chandigarh too which was excellent! I would love to give a session and/or to arrange the same kind of event in the North but I am not sure how well the people are going to appreciate it and it’s important because without the audience, there wouldn’t be a point  of arranging an event isn’t it? Anyways, that’s for the future and it looks promising because if it’s one guy today, there may be 10 tomorrow. After a lots of picture sessions, we were now back to the hotel.

Since we were all very hungry, we again decided to go to the same Punjabi Grill and it was again good and it was just so excellent that I could get share the space with all these guys which are not just great experts in Oracle database and related technologies but are also absolutely awesome human beings too and I am so glad and honoured to have them as my friends and mentor! Now, it’s time to have some sleep and tomorrow, I shall be heading to home. It’s too bad that I won’t be able to catch up with the rest of the tour because I got work to do but I believe, it’s going to be a great event and if you are in any of the cities where the event is going to be, try to be there and attend it! You won’t get  a chance soon if not at all, to meet such experts and hear from them face to face!