Outward Bound Singapore (OBS) - The Ice-Breaker

Hi
One of the best events organized by the NUS MBA office was OBS. It was a fun couple of days which served as a great ice-breaker. Before I get into OBS, I should describe a bit about my physical self. It will serve as a background to understand whatever I describe later in this post. For all my life, I have been fat. I was born over-weight and I have stayed over-weight. There have been phases in life (going through one such phase now) where I have wanted to lose weight and become decently fit. But these phases have come and gone. When I joined NUS (after a couple of months @ home) I was as fat as I had been in the last 5 years.

The OBS is an interesting organization which specialized in outdoor activities which also serve as a team building platform. True to their reputation they took us, the batch of 2009, to an island off Singapore mainland called Pulau Ubin. It was a serene island, away from humanity, and made for an ideal location to get to know other.

In Pulau Ubin, we were split into teams. The activities started innocently enough with some basic team building activities. But then we went into the most dreaded activity - Rock Climbing. For all my love for the outdoors, rock climbing was not my cup of tea. I was physically (read "fat and unfit") not up for it. I was shit scared of embarassing myself in front of my batch-mates. I feared that the embarassment would stick for the next couple of years @ NUS. Having said all this, I still put on my bravest face @ OBS. Infact, I volunteered from my team, for the first rock climbing event. It was a small pole to climb. And to my surprise, I managed to climb the pole. It seemed easy enough.

We progressed to the next level. It was an adventure course wherein we had to climg to the top (around 10 metres high) using a rope-ladder. To be honest, if this was India, I would not have ventured near it. But this was Singapore and a lot of my classmates, regardless of gender, managed to complete the course. I tried to delay the inevitable as much as I can. Forced by peer pressure, I gave the course a go ...

The next game was climbing up a rock wall. Once again, regardless of gender, lot of folks scaled the wall. Thats when I realised that a lot of girls in my batch were both fit and gutsy. As for yours truly, driven by peer pressure, I did give the rock wall a go...

I am tempted to tell you that in I managed to scale both the above courses. But this isn't the movies and we all have our limitations. Though I did not complete the course, I wasn't the worst either. In both the courses, I managed to complete half the course. And this was possible only because of the cheering I received from my team-mates. It made me take that extra step when everything within me told me to give up. This was the great experience I had at OBS.

We were at Pulau Ubin for a couple of days. I met a lot of people during that time. Some of them have gone on to become my best friends. There are others to whom I say "Hi" today only because I met them at Pulau Ubin. The rigours of the academic course (and my own personal inhibitions) limited the number of people I interacted with during the academics term. In that sense, OBS was the great ice-breaker wherein I saw/met almost everyone in my batch.

Cheers,
Suraj