Abhishek Deshpande

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WordCamp Bhopal – WWWP5k And ViaLux

This weekend had many things happening around. WordCamp Bhopal and ViaLux Anomaly in Mumbai were on the same day, 24th September 2016. I was supporting my team offline in my second Ingress Anomaly. The result: Mumbai is Blue.

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For details, here’s the Mumbai scorecard.

WordCamp Bhopal was my first WordCamp in Central India. All the camps I had attended were in the western part of India (I missed Jabalpur and Delhi). Despite living in Nagpur (the centre of India), I had never been to Bhopal. WordCamp Bhopal and #WWWP5k were a great plan to explore the unknown city.

The train journey began around 1 PM. I reached Bhopal by 7:30 PM. Mobile networking took me some time to figure out — Vodafone calling was working fine but Airtel’s internet was working in Bhopal. It seems mobile network is a big issue in the capital of Madhya Pradesh.

The initial plan for the #WWWP5k walk in the lake capital of Bhopal was to complete a Bhopal religious mission and some portal upgrades with @Maximus175. Due to a medical emergency, he was not available, so we aborted the mission and I just upgraded some portals. After that, I joined the Milesweb team at lakeside Ashoka’s Thus the Urban Socialite at Bada Talab.

Photo by Chinmay at Bada Talab

Lovely food at a beautiful location. We talked about the city & community activities.

Day 2, Bhopal.

The day started a little late at 7:30, so we rushed towards the WordCamp venue.

Skipping the crowd, I joined the WordPress India community people for chai.

The day was great, filled with talks from Puneet, Alex, Aditya, Rahul, Nirav, Swapnil, Amit and Saurabh.

Rahul shared how his team solves the vicious circle. Good to know how rtCamp managed it.

Apart from the talks, it was a great pleasure meeting people from SwiftIdeas, InkThemes and ThemeIsle. Various conversations about themes and development strategies continued throughout the day.

I was disappointed to learn that students at LNCT did not know that “Nagpur was the capital of Madhya Pradesh”. 🙁
Nagpur has its charm. At the end of the day, the announcement from LNCT College was great — an official meetup place in Bhopal.

Overall, WCBhopal was a great day. Meanwhile, Amit and I were monitoring ViaLux activities on the Intel Map & Telegram. We enjoyed the winning moment.

I started my return journey on the Chhattisgarh Express at 7 PM, sharing the compartment with some Delhi University geology students visiting MP on an educational tour. I was surprised by their knowledge about wildlife. The conversation continued late into the night. I reached Nagpur by 3 AM. That was when I started my #WWWP5K walk, playing Ingress from the station to the famous Zero Mile Stone of India — so no photos of the #WWWP5K walk.

Aditya picked me up from Zero Mile. We had some planning for the next week over jalebi-poha at Shankar Nagar, then called it a night.

I’m still exchanging thoughts with new connections from Bhopal. I look forward to meeting them at WordCamp Nashik.

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