Sitting Idle on the beach I started ruminating as to how the world has changed in the past few months, for me.
It has not been the way it was before, might never be the same again as well. It was just a few months ago that we used to sit idle in the class, trying hard to concentrate on the soporific lectures, seeing the day pass by, dull and routine with no activity at all .
One day my friend said,” Let’s organize an Event!” Organising was never new to us, but what he was referring to was INTERFACE, Annual Festival of the Department of Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering. This has never been a small festival and we know for sure that it will never be one too, Big, in terms of the number of participants, Big in terms of the budget, Big in every single sense of the word. Though it is an annual fest, it was stalled a couple of years ago, for some reasons.
Reviving an event of its stature was a challenge in itself. We, as a bunch of friends have always been of the opinion that the student life is not all about the three A’s, i.e., Attendance, Academics and Assignments but much more than that, it was time to show people why. So, we made up our minds. We got the official permission in a couple of months, the major part of which went in convincing the authorities that we actually can do this.
Then we got going with the work. We started with the website, the posters, the brochures etc. followed. It was not Easy, to say the least, the response we got in such a short span of time was overwhelming.
For all of us, it was much more than just an annual event, seniors started pouring in their mails, as to how they were missing their version of the ‘Interface’ and how they yearned to come down to the college just to checkout how things were going and the heights we had taken the festival to. That gave us the necessary fillip, all these and a million more good things kept us going all along.
The fun part was the fact that we knew what to do and where to get it done but not exactly how to do it. So, we got help from our friends in other departments, say, for the design and building of the website and the Online events segment, our friends from the Computer Science and IT departments gave us the supporting hand similarly other departments for other segments. For many an event the brain and idea was ours, skill and support was theirs.
A few of my friends and me spent a good part of our Engineering life visiting all the top notch universities in the country and participating in their events. So we had seen it all and it was time to put that into practice. The best thing about this event has always been the fact that, the total department, final, third, second and first years alike work like a team, a few lead and others give total support.
Finally the D-Day arrived .The number of participants that we had was phenomenal by any standards, never before had any departmental event seen so many turning up for a festival. Before the event started we said to ourselves that this should not be a regular festival, so we made sure that everything about this should be new, large and innovative and so it was. Right from the design and dynamics of the entire festival to the canvas, everything was innovative, original and huge. When you paint something on such a huge canvas there bound to be a few shortcomings but they were very few and far spaced and might be because of our inexperience in organizing such a thing, but no major organizational flaw. That is what leaves us with a good taste at the end of it all.
Looking back at it will always leave us with some very sweet memories.
