This is my 10th blogpost, therefore taking this opportunity I would like to thank all my blog visitors for their tremendous support and love, without this it wouldn’t have been so much of fun and pursuit to write something readable and/or meaningful. Blog is getting continuously evolved as new features are being introduced by Weebly team, heartiest thanks to them too.
Creative team at work..
Continuing from the previous post, fund raising was the toughest part since the time was less and we didn’t have a major attraction which could convince sponsors that there will be a huge footfall for the event. When the whole event was being planned we wanted to call a celebrity like Jagjit Singh, Jaspinder Narula (or Salman Khan by Javed) but all these people charge multiple times of our projected budget, so we dropped the idea. Then we considered some of the rock bands which would have certainly appealed to the youth but the only problem that Me & Aman felt was that this is the first time we are having an event and we are expecting professors & scientists to be a part of it, so having Ghazal or Sufi eve would be a better option regarding the masses. Considering our status, I thought to contact Siddharth Mohan (I know him through ‘The Art of Living’) for Sufi eve. He has few albums under his belt and ‘Sufi Strings’ is his latest.
Although everyone contributed for the sponsor hunt, but the people who actually stormed on the front were Arushi, Chandrita, Vandana, Srijani, Astha, Sulekha, Anita, Ankita, Mohsin, Wasi, Aman and Javed; amongst the seniors- Raghav, Sid (Swarnendra), Shruti Goyal, Shruti Jain, Jayant, Amardeep, Shweta and Vikas brought the liberal support from the sponsors. And special thanks to the parents of Karnika, Parul and Raghav for their contribution. Arrangements for media coverage were taken up by Karan (our one man army). He, along with Rimpy and Neharika reached out to almost every media house and gave their heart & soul to the job.
Annual Magazine..(L to R) Editorial board, Cover page design by Swarnendra & released by the Director.
We also released first annual departmental magazine on the day of event, it was a collection of fine piece of work by the students of ACBR, put together by our very dedicated editorial board (Karnika, Utpreksha, Ishita and Sonia). Financially speaking, it helped us to raise lot of funds by providing a means of advertisement for the sponsors.
At the venue, events at a glance. Middle pic shows paintings made by Mojahid up for sale.
Some of the Off-stage events outcome
On the day of event, off-stage events were totally taken care by creative team (led by Astha, Zeeshan, Mojahid & Lipsa) and we got to see some eye-soothing work by the participants. Team of Jayant, Shruti jain, Arushi, Chandrita, Srijani, Abhilasha and Parul took the responsibility of on-stage events and made it a big hit.
On-stage event team (few are missing)
These people used to stay in ‘library’ for hours after lectures inorder to prepare stuff for the event (few times I even requested them to change their place of work as personally I find libraries very gloomy, but they never budged). On stage events also included dance (item numbers :P ) from our side and street play from Acharya Narendra Dev College team.
In the following video, we had prepared these numbers with lot of hard work except number between me and Javed; which was prepared with almost no preparation prior.!
Now time for surprise, there are two secrets that most of the people don’t know. First, we adeptly saved decent amount of money, later which was directed towards the farewell celebrations and it turns out that you (my classmates) end up paying only half the amount that was being budgeted. Second, a part of our money was directed towards social service. As Siddharth Mohan is closely associated with ‘The Art of Living’, he has undertaken lot of social service projects and he does concerts inorder to generate funds for the same. So even after being so economical (in comparison to other celebrities), we all managed to do some noble work.
Talking about my experience during the event, I grew by leaps and bounds, seeing so many skills cropping up in people around, left me with a happy feeling. I lost regular pattern of almost everything whether it was food or sleep except one thing i.e. cleaning myself inside out. One day during this inside cleaning (Saadhna), I got wonderful idea to save big chunk of money; we made CD of our magazine for students and got few hard copies print for teachers (each hard copy costs `150 whereas CD costs under ` 10), we would have been first institute to release e-copy of our magazineJ . When we were trying very hard for the sponsors and nothing was seem to be moving, people turned towards the God for help and prayed hard; result was that in the final week of preparation we jumped from budget of 20k to 90k.! People who are closely associated with Chaperons would certainly agree that this was nothing less than a divine intervention.
Talking about my experience during the event, I grew by leaps and bounds, seeing so many skills cropping up in people around, left me with a happy feeling. I lost regular pattern of almost everything whether it was food or sleep except one thing i.e. cleaning myself inside out. One day during this inside cleaning (Saadhna), I got wonderful idea to save big chunk of money; we made CD of our magazine for students and got few hard copies print for teachers (each hard copy costs `150 whereas CD costs under ` 10), we would have been first institute to release e-copy of our magazineJ . When we were trying very hard for the sponsors and nothing was seem to be moving, people turned towards the God for help and prayed hard; result was that in the final week of preparation we jumped from budget of 20k to 90k.! People who are closely associated with Chaperons would certainly agree that this was nothing less than a divine intervention.
Siddharth Mohan with Sulekha and Arushi.. In right pic you can see angels(white halos).. they also came to attend the concert or rather bless it :)
On the day of event I received as many calls as there are in a year for me. Me and Aman were running all over the place, on top of it Police also came in picture. I was thoroughly occupied dealing with sponsors, Raghav and Aman took my bike to bring electrician at the venue to fix power problem. It turns out that they were apparently bringing him on the bike with them, making three persons riding on a bike, on top of it Raghav had kept helmet in his hand rather than on his head, and to make situation more dramatic, documents of bike were with me. No prize for guessing that there was challan and I had to go there with documents to settle the issue. This along with other shortcomings during the day, delayed the start of event by 2 hours.! But skilful management of on and off stage teams took care of everything and we were able to start with Sufi concert on time. Although few people were sceptical about the quality of concert but later those were the people who came up to me and praised the concert.
With Siddharth being so accommodating, we all joined him on stage and danced on Sufi numbers.! Actually, if you know Sufism in correct sense then it is supposed to strike a chord in you that brings dancing naturally; And it gave an amazing feeling to see people dancing crazily all around :D (Oh not to mention, I was dancing too). Teaching and non- teaching staff couldn’t stop appreciating our efforts and congratulated us for the success. This made event end on a high note and filled us all with a feeling of pride. We made profit, we did charity and we had extraordinary celebrations in the end.
Some masti moments captured
Aman- Yaaro ka Yaar.!
Aman is the unsung Hero of this event. He was always there with me through every thick and thin, this event wouldn’t have been a success without his perseverance. There had been a situation which threw me off balance; it was when I refused to deal with ‘Hindustan times’ (HT), as I could foresee the legal problems related to it. This only Aman understood and rest of the class was in split till the time HT made their intentions clear. For me and Aman, at venue the day started at 7 am and ended at 11 pm; after settling money issues with our food provider and later collecting cheque from a sponsor.. But we knew today’s gonna be a good night.
Lots of Love.
Yours sincerely,
Rubberstamp ;)
PS- Distinct thanks to Bose Sir and Rajinder Sir for their untiring support and faith in us.
PPS- Inorder to improve my blog, I have added a survey form at the end of each blogpost. Please do fill it up.
Yours sincerely,
Rubberstamp ;)
PS- Distinct thanks to Bose Sir and Rajinder Sir for their untiring support and faith in us.
PPS- Inorder to improve my blog, I have added a survey form at the end of each blogpost. Please do fill it up.
