The Perficient towers kick started January 2025 with Celebration of the festival Pongal celebrated on the Day 1 of Tamil Month Thai with the announcement for the following competitions. Rangoli Competition: Form a team of 5 to 8 members and showcase your creativity by crafting beautiful rangoli designs. Pongal Cooking Competition: Form a team of 5 to 10 members and display your culinary talents by preparing mouth-watering Pongal dishes.
Employees can participate in any one of the competitions. As I was interested in coloring and presentation to the judges, I saw this as an opportunity to give a try at competitions after almost a decade and enrolled to Participate in Rangoli competition to be held on 9th Jan 2025.
Team Pongolo Pongal:
Gayathri Narayanan is the lead for our Rangoli team “Pongalo Pongal”. At that time, she was the only person whom I know of in prior as she hosted Enable JIRA training when I joined Perficient. We were a team of 7. Gayathri, Nagapriya sundaramoorthy, Smitha Dutt, Kavitha mani, Sathya roopa Ganesan, Tamilarasi Manickam and me. The Theme given for the Rangoli is “Harvesting”. We had a quick teams meeting a day prior to the competition.
Ideas and Preparation:
Each team member pitched in their ideas for the rangoli. Team decided to incorporate latest technologies such as Drip irrigation, solar panels to power up the pumps and drones for fertilizer and seeds sowing and did our research for the inter cropping system used in kongu regions of Tamilnadu, India and incorporated it in our art and resourced small pots, few stencils, additional colors for representation of the traditional Pongal in our Rangoli. We informed HCM team regarding the colors and Quantity needed for the competition.
On the Day of the competition:
Colleagues were dressed up in ethnic wears. We were assigned a floor and the area where the Rangoli has to be made. I arrived early to collect the Materials from The HCM Team. Time allotted was 1 hour. Priya and Gayathri did the sketches. Roopa had a deployment on the day of the competition, but she managed to join us. Kavitha did the Tamil letterings. we made a small representation of the actual Pongal. Smitha, Tamilarasi and me did the coloring and I managed to do the scripting and the explanation of our theme to the judges, Kapildev Munusamy and Rahul Thombre and we quoted Thiru Kural
உழுதுண்டு வாழ்வாரே வாழ்வார்மற் றெல்லாம்
தொழுதுண்டு பின்செல் பவர்.
which explains to “They alone live who live by agriculture; all others lead a cringing, dependent life” which emphasizes the importance of Farmers. This event brought out the artistic side of the techies. The preparation and the execution of the competition was so fun and informative. We were one of the winners and were awarded gift vouchers.
The Real win- Conclusion:
The Team “Pongalo Pongal” formed only by the interest of colleagues across various floors/projects, and we networked outside our projects and had a chance to learn from each one of us who met only on the day of competition, but co- ordinated, worked on our strengths and finally won the competition. The networking and the friendship we achieved from the competition is the Real win.
