I was in fifth grade when I first saw the rubik's cube in one of my fathers friends house. The little piece of plastic greatly interest me and remarkably genius I thought of my father's friend who showed me how to solve a single layer of the cube, which I after repeatedly trying again and again could not manage to solve. I got one when I come in eight grade and withing a month I can solve it on my own(without mugging a single standard algorithms). However it used to take me around 5-6 hours to solve it completely(there were couple of moves which I cudnt manage to work out then, so I just re-solve the first layer again aaaannndddddd again till the cube hits the preferred shape).

In October of 2007, I come to know that World Championship for Rubik's Cube is to be held in Budapest, Hungary same month. I got a bit excited and I thought of that as an interesting thing. I know one took place in 1983 and felt really pleasant since such a competition has not been held for a long time(I was wrong though since two championship took place in 2003, 05 as well, I didn't know of them then). I instantly decided to participate(all of those who know my speed will laugh at me since solving time of the participants in these competitions is way better then that of mine).Nevertheless, I decided to contact WCA the organization which is managing the event. I got a reply and they called me to come and participate(the preliminary round was to be given there only). However, I could not go mostly because it was too expensive to go there and besides I really do not have a stand(I didn't really know how bad I was then, I realize that much lately. To know my situation just understand that I do not even know the Jasmine Lee beginner's solution, leave Friedrich F2l, OLL, PLL ,etc ) . They however send me an email(that is when I told them that I won't be able to come) that they are planning to organize an Indian Open. I suddenly thought of Techkriti and that it can be organized in our own Techkriti for the coming year. I state my wish in an email I send him, sadly they never replied back and so the story ended there.
I then happens to meet one of my batch mate who coincidently seems to share my name, Saurabh Chawdhary(saucy as we call him). He was again one of the very enthusiastic cubers in the campus. He told me that he wants both of us to organize a competition in Techkriti this year related to Rubik's cube. I then told him about the WCA mail they send me mentioning the Indian Open. We then talk to Shubg(Shubham Gupta, for those of you who dont know him) who was the festival coordinator of the Techkriti and he agreed to the idea. The two of us then started seriously pursuing the feat of convincing WCA for getting their affiliation for Indian Open. After months of persuasion, submission of various documents giving relevant informations WCA finally agreed to give their affiliation and so the official declaration of Indian open'08 was declared by Techkriti. The problem however have just begin.......

We in one of our documents told WCA that the expected number of participants will be around 30-40, frankly speaking of which we thought then is a highly exaggerated number since I knew of only 4 people in the campus who can solve Rubik's cube(1 is myself, other saucy) and all of them have pretty awful time of solve then. So how are we going to organize the competition? Will be making mockery of ourselves during competition? Will WCA be very angry once the competition gets over? Do somebody outside iitk will come and participate? How are we going to arrange the required stuffs? Prize money?Sponsors.. The questions were just too many and at the face we were pretending to be too optimistic to handle all of that but deep down I was a bit skeptical of the unearthed potential that the members on the table bring along.

But we begin with our first cubing session, the expected junta was around 10-15 people but we were wrong (you will find that this will happen often as we'll progress across the blog)the first session saw around 50 people. The second thought was will we be really be able to tell them how to solve a cube(for those of you who have done cubing, you must be aware its not a cakewalk to arrange few plastic pieces with proper orientation and permutation), however again I prove to be wrong as one of my asst. coordinator Apurv really help us to show the trick of how to arrange the silly thing in the way it looks most elegant and beautiful. We just before Techkriti arrange a mock competition for the iitk junta which again witness a good participation and I know number of participants is least of our concerns. Oops I move too much forward in time, here we go..... flashbackkkk. So around December one of our another concerns(amongst so many others) is the equipment(Stackmat timers and Displays) and the various forms of cubes(square one, 4*4*4) , the techkriti team here greatly helped us in meeting our cube requirements, but since we were a bit short of budget we cannot manage to buy Stackmats and timers on our own(Techkriti wasnt a 70 Lakh INR festival, an year b4), so we talk to WCA for the help and they help us in persuading Seven Towns(a UK based company, also one of the largest seller of Rubik's product) and they generously agreed to help us after weeks of persuasion and talking. So we were all set to host the competition with the kind of positive energy you always wanted to sense(this doesn't happen that often). The event as we then expected saw a very good participation. The total number of participation is around 50 which is a good number for a new event(especially when the event is solving a Rubik's cube in minimum time). I was happy at the end of the day seeing the participants list, frankly speaking I didn't find the level of competition bad(which one might find once he start comparing our cubers with the some of the European cubers), keeping in mind the fact that most of them are just one month old cubers. However there was one down side to it. The number of spectators were almost zero or close to zero in the event, all the seats in front of the stage were mostly empty(except the few with participants relaxing on them and team members). I think one of the probably reason for the same is that the competition was hold in the Outreach Auditorium of IITK which kind of isolates with the mainstream Techkriti participants coming from outside, so unless someone is not interested in cubing he won't walk to the event. One of the probable suggestion to improve that would be to host this event next year with either SAC or Basky Court(I know building a stage, meeting other requirements will be difficult but if the culture has to be spread out, one got to think out of the box to achieve the same)
Lastly, on a more personal note I was a bit taken aback by my own performance, since I started cubing so early(remember eighth grade) and at the time of competition I was a junior undergraduate(although there have been several years in between when I didn't touch the cube) I couldn't manage to qualify the finals(It didn't hurt much at the time of competition though, since I was the coordinator of the event and it would have been unfair getting into the finals of one's own competition). I am working on the few algorithms these days(ironically I found that learning cubing from standard algorithms isn't all that bad) and in Next Indian Open I would only be a participant and will not let my childhood toy down by giving a mediocre presence in the much awaited event.

cheers,
Saurabh Agarwal
Coordinator
Indian Open Rubik's cube'08