A Soulful Experience

You may have heard that the Mumbai installment of Nokia's "Soul of the Night" challenge was held on March 31, a few days after it hit the capital city. Yours truly was lucky to get an invite to participate and I must say it was some experience! Although Nokia did something similar earlier when they launched the 6110 Navigator, this was on a whole new level. Let me tell you about the experience.

Nokia's N82 Wireless Adventure claimed to take the city by storm. Out of the thousands of entries they shortlisted only ten, and these ten participants were allowed to have one ‘Navigator’, if you will. The job was to race through the city following ‘strict’ rules of traffic etiquette and make their way to checkpoints where they would be presented with a certain task to accomplish. On completion of the said task they would receive the next clue and so on.

Since contestants were issued Nokia N82s fully loaded with Nokia Maps, the clues provided were in the form of GPS coordinates via Bluetooth. The contestants had to navigate the city to get to the checkpoint, perform the task issued to them and take a picture with the handset as proof. Although the race through the suburbs of Mumbai itself may have been an adrenaline rush, the tasks give were fun and I’d like to get hold of the guys who came up with them, for reasons I shall soon explain.