The Chennai Twitter Meetup

The venue was decided to be Mocha, K N K Road, Nungambakkam as it seemed to be sort-of a central location to most people. We had decided initially to meet up at 16:30, but then decided to move it to 19:00 as Narayanan felt it would be too early. I tweeted this change in plan but seems that Ashish didn't read this update(I wouldn't blam him though, with the amount of tweeting that I do, anyone could've missed it!). Anyways he got the tweet just before he left for Mocha @ 16:15, else he'd be waiting there for like 3 hours! Anyways once the venue was fixed, he didn't know how to make his way from Kelly's to Mocha, but Balaji was kind enough to tweet the EXACT directions, which road, where to take left right etc. That was pretty awesome.

Ashish & Narayanan were the first to reach at 18:45, though Ashish was waiting outside Narayanan went right in and started having a hookah (later we come to know that Mocha is like Narayanan's 3rd home - 2nd being that of his friends' 😛 ). Gayathri was bang on time @ 19:00, and I was a bit late(by about 10 minutes). Balaji and palam joined us, followed by Karthik.

I have to admit, when I saw Karthik first time, I was like "wha? this is Karthik?" LOL. I think he'll kill me but as Narayanan had mentioned, Karthik looks like a tall, rowdy-type in his picture, in real life, he isn't that tall, and (I'm going to be dead for sure)he looks like a small, sweet school college kid =))

Anyways,  We started off the tweetup with a small introduction, followed by a re-introduction as Palam, Karthik had joined us after the initial introduction session. Karthik said nothing much except that he's from Loyola. Balaji mentioned about his work on Open Sim, which is an Open Source version of the well known Second Life sim. He also mentioned about his work on electronic circuits with Zari(the saree border). That was like really cool, got to ask him more on that the next time we meet.

Palam was crisp and to-the point, like last the tweetup, spoke very little. He was telling us how he's always been into webdesigning since like eternity(ok just a metaphor).

Ashish mentioned about his passion for blogging, and the recent problems with his VPS, and how he's been painfully, manually restoring each of his posts. Man you sure need hell loads of patience to do what Ashish's doing to get his site back up.

Narayanan - well I think multi-faceted person would be an understatement to describe this guy. He mentioned about his consulting firm, his part time job as a recruiter while in 3rd year of college and how he'd come back to HIS college as a recruiter while being a student at the same college simultaneously. That was real intersting stuff from him.

Me crapped about my life, how I came to 3i, and my job there - nothing much to talk on 😛 Gayathri mentioned about her position as a php and Ruby on Rails developer at Strall LLC. (and Dayammn I didn't know she was married).

After the short-long introduction session, everybody was doing general chit-chat, Ashish was giving us some gyaan regarding monetizing from blogs, Narayanan was recollecting some of his "incidents" -> the shirt one being the most humourous one!

We also discussed on the stupidity that is IndiaTV, Aaj Tak, and all of us agreed on one thing - that we got the latest news via twitter faster than any other forms. We also discussed on how addictive tweeting has become - atleast for me, with over 10,700 tweets now, and Balaji meticulously remember quite a few of mine and other tweeps' tweets, quite phenomenal, I might say. Balaji also mentioned how twitter users-who follow each other are more closely knit and know more about each other within a very short span of time, as compared to other Social Networking sites. Karthik mentioned his problems with ICICI Bank, and Narayan being a former ICICI-an was defending ICICI - I must agree with Narayanan though, banking with ICICI has been a breeze for me, guess it Karthik is stuck with some bad luck!

As I mentioned earlier, Mocha's Narayanan's third home, and he's ordered the food - Pasta with red sauce - which was AWESOME, DAMN good stuff. He also ordered this Vertigo - this huge Chocolate cake - I'm definitely having them the next time I go back to Mocha! After some more chit-chats, hookahs and lots of cigarettes, we wrapped up the tweetup at 22:00, as Gayathri had to catch her train to Bangalore. It was a really nice experience, had a blast, hoping for more tweetups!

You can also read up on Karthik's post on the tweetup.

Update: Here are the pictures taken. Sorry about the quality - it was pretty dark, and @Gbot's phone cam did a great job in capturing them.