4 days. 88 students. A small Gujrati Township. 9 ambitious science projects. Seems like an impossible situation right? Not quite, because this is exactly what happened on the Year XI trip to Jamnagar to fulfil the IB requirement of a Group 4 (Science) Project, which aimed to amalgamate the natural sciences, allowing students from each science field to come together to create a holistic project addressing the theme "Energy", set in the township of Jamnagar.

The groups were pre-decided, with 10 students in each group, an eclectic mix of biologists, physicists, chemists and the odd environmentalist. On the first day, Saturday, after we landed in Jamnagar we were taken for a tour of the Reliance refinery, and then the Green Belt. The processes that occurred at each of these places were clearly explained through power points and interactions with various connoisseurs. Each of these experiences opened up new areas of science and research which few of us would have dreamed of before, and inspired all of us to come with the most innovative projects to do justice to everything we were expected to imbibe from our visit.

A visit to the local village, health centre and farm the next morning, proved to be the most inspiring as most of the groups chose to base their projects on these locations. The project titles ranged from "energy efficiency in a cow" to "improving the energy of a local village farm" or even "checking the possibility of introducing the sun and wind as alternate energy titles". Seemingly ambitious to some, or deceptively easy to others, the students chose each of these topics in order to allow them to combine each of the science fields to offer pragmatic solutions to any potential energy crisis, most of which would be pertinent on a scale far beyond the singular township of Jamnagar.

Our days in Jamnagar, few as they were, were filled with rushed visits to our chosen location, trips to the Kokila Dhirubhai Ambani Vidyamandir (KDAV) School labs and the residencies where we lived. if we worked hard, spending a minimum of 6-9 hours a day thinking about our science projects, we played even harder, interschool games of throwball, football and basketball every evening between DAIS and KDAV.

On Tuesday evening, before our promised barbeque dinner, we gathered together, all 88 of us finally together to present our projects to not only each other, but also our teachers who had so patiently guided, suggested and improved our projects with their thoughtful insights and ability to make us realize the significance of details we had previously dismissed as inconsequential. Although each group had been allotted a time of only 10 minutes, it was nearly impossible to condense the enthusiasm, ideas and energy of the last 4 days into a 10 minute presentation resulting in almost all of the groups overreaching their time limit, resulting in dinner being delayed by nearly 1.5 hours, though surprisingly no one seemed to mind. Acting as a testimony of how involved we'd become with each of our science projects was the few strains of conversation that could be overheard as the group of us proceeded towards the buses having completed the presentations at the Reliance Learning Centre. Snippets of conversation flew around with phrases such as "oh, we should have calculated the projectile instead of rate of flow of water" or "the enthalpy changes of groundnut oil could have been compared to the enthalpy of mustard oil" highlighting that though the project was over, the enthusiasm hadn't ebbed.

Having enjoyed the hospitality of the Reliance residencies for the last four nights, time for us to return to Bombay dawned with Wednesday morning. The ride to the airport was solemn, the voices more subdued, the laughter less hearty. Although no one wanted to admit it, the trip despite its work purpose had been in Mr. Coleman's words "one of the best" with each of the students having worked and enjoyed in equal measure. Returning to Bombay was like being extracted from the cocoon of novelties that Jamnagar had wrapped us in, which everyone was reluctant to emerge from.

Shloka