SCL, Hyderabad

For those who are not with Deloitte, Impact day is our annual community service day. On this day, all Deloitte professionals irrespective of their service line, service area or the post at which they are working, have to participate across the world.There are various threads in this league for doing community service which you can lead or participate.Some are really exciting and some just look that way.Unfortunately, mine was the later.It could have been fun if not for my friend Abhineet who tricked me out of a interesting thread in which you were supposed to take a group of orphan to the Hyderabad Zoo.And I still don't know why I selected 'Heritage Hyderabad'. Isn't it a fancy name for a thread? I just thougth I would get to go to some cool mueseum and all.All dreams shattered, I was allocated the State Central Library.

One good thing I did was to get someone else in this stupid thread and was victorious to convince Binu into it.Now I had someone to share the frustration.On that day,had to get up at 6 in the morning because we had to reach office by 7.That's another crappy thing about Impact Day. Why do we need to get up early on a weekend so early? Can't we start at 10 or 11 for that matter.? I knew it wouldn't be worth it and I was right. The buses from the office started at 9.Please note the 2 hour delay. Had these 2 hours been used to extend our sleep, we would have done some efficient community service.Anyways, after reaching office, we .collected the essentials they were giving to all the volunteers.It had some crappy Gujarati crap, a muffin, an energy drink and a bottle of water.Killing time became so difficult.I wonder if it's difficult to small talk in the morning when you have been forcibly taken away from that wonderful dream in which you were romancing with the love of your life on some lonely island amongst the cool breeze and blue currents.

Finally, we started and eventually we reached there around 10.They road trip to the SCL was fun though. Courtesy the world cup fever, we decided to play a football quiz which Binu hosted. The contestants were myself and his friend Kadar.As far my knowledge in Football goes, it starts and ends at Old trafford.I can tell few more on EPL but 'all the world cups' was not my cup of tea.So as I expected, I was trailing 8-0. It became really embarrassing at this point and I suggested that the quiz should be about Football and not just the world-cup. That indirectly meant that questions related to EPL should be there so that I can save myself from being clean sheeted. Somehow the host was convinced and I put up a mind-blowing return performance.Although I lost 16-14 later.

We reached the place.The building was actually a heritage one, really old and all. I was shocked to see what the thread leads had in mind for us as the first task.It was to take a group picture.Duh! Shouldn't be the last thing after doing the community work we were supposed to do. So everyone suddenly acquired pace to find a good place so that they would look good in the picture. After that, people were waiting for instructions from the leads but they themselves seemed lost. Most of the people didn't do a thing for the first hour after the photo shoot.Then, we were directed towards some old building which was the library's office were we were supposed to place new tube lights in place. When we reached there, the electrician was himself was having a hard time.So we had to move to some other place.We were again unemployed.Then we were made to clean the books and the shelf.That actually felt like doing something which had value.We three cleaned a whole big shelf with more than thousand books.After that we short-listed some books among millions of ruined ones which can be useful and which can be scanned in the digital library. The last task was to transfer books from some storage to the front room which had like 30 of us forming a human chain.That felt good.You know what, we always look for instant gratification be it anything. But just the thought that even if our efforts at some point of time influence some reader to pick up some book, that's worth it.I was happy at the end.

But I was disgusted with one thing that happened there. It's a shame that the people who went there for community service were also playing a role to pollute it.Among us were people who had their lunch and left all the stuff and plastic bottles right at the entrance of the library. What a shame! At first i was reluctant but seeing one friend of mine picking somebody Else's leftovers, i too joined him.This was all about SCL and about a day well spent.