Cultural festival:
The concept of the cultural festival was devised by the Delhi colleges before 1970s (primarily, St. Stephens , Hindu College ,Miranda House, et al ) and spread to IIT Kanpur who started it at least five years before IIT Bombay. They used to call their festivals the “Xth IIT Kanpur cultural festival”. Brand building was not a concept then.
In 1972, Colin (H5) and Salil Gutt (H8) got elected “General Secretary” and “Social Secretary”. Both were third year students (in itself unusual!), from the batch now called Class of 75′. Salil’s campaign platform was that he would organise a Cultural festival like IITK with the promise that girls from other colleges (besides Sophia) would come to the campus. Colin was more sober and ran on much more serious issues. Obviously, Salil won with a thumping majority! Politics has not changed much!
When it came to delivering on the promise, neither had any clue how to go about it because they hadn’t represented IIT in any festival yet. So, the task fell on the culture vultures on campus largely represented by un-elected members of the Board of “Technik”, the student campus rag of which I was the junior most member.
The festival had been scheduled for December during the holidays to accommodate visitors. In October, not much work had been done. And panic set in.
That’s when the culture vultures stepped in and took over. The first festival took place in December with 14 colleges (mainly from Bombay but also St. Stephen’s, Miranda House, Loreto Cal , Madras Christian College etc. participating. Of course Sophia came.) All males from out of town were put up in H1 and girls in ladies hostel. It was over three days with a one act play (in the Convo), a debate (topic: This house believes in the dark side of the moon) essay (topic: the generation gap lies between the ears), solo western and Indian singing and a couple of other minor events. No outside shows.
Since, the Technik Board was busy organising the festival, I was put in charge of the daily news leaflet called “The Daily Noise”. And to organise the essay competition, which involved such enormous tasks as making sure there were enough paper and pens for some 12 participants!
For the first Mood I one act play competition the mikes were facing the audience and you could not hear the Actors but only the audience!
Shorty( Hemant Shah) got it in the neck because Loretto Cal girls were nearly in tears as their Ionesco play was a fiasco.
Alyque Padamsee as a judge had some caustic comments to make about the engineering skills of IITians.
Fun Fact:
The debate was won by Tillotama Mukherjee , with Shashi Tharoor coming in second and our very own Jairam Ramesh an Honorable mention. As you know Ms. Mukherjee went on to become Shashi’s first wife and he realised that you can never win an argument with your wife!
The name:
One evening , the Board of Editors of Technik (Ramesh Advani, V. V. Chari, Basabi Mukherjee , Krishnaswami, and yours truly) met in the Gym office to discuss the next issue. As usual, the talk drifted into unrelated topics with Basabi and Ramesh discussing music and Kichami and I discussing football and Chari day dreaming. Suddenly, Chari said loudly, “That’s it! “. We all looked at him askance. He turned to Basabi and said “You’ve got it. That’s the name.”
“What’s the name?” she asked. “Mood indigo.” he said.
“Oh, that. I was just telling Ramesh I heard a recording of Duke Ellington play the jazz piece ‘Mood indigo’ on the radio last night which sounded quite nice.”
“No, No. I mean, it’s a good name for the cultural festival.”
“But what does it mean?” I said.
I should have kept my mouth shut!!
As the junior most member of that group, I was given the task of figuring out what it meant.
That night, in the hostel over cups of tea and coffee, the ever creative PA (Pradeep Anand- he of the “Indian in cowboy country” fame) came up with Red for passion and Blue for intellect and the merger of the two creating the right mix for cultural upliftment. or some such shit.
And we published that crap in the first edition of the Daily Noose ( Daily Noise ?) in an attempt to sell it to a very sceptical audience.
The aftermath :
Budget : Rs 17,000 Actual spend: Rs 22,000. All from the gym budget.
A few days later Prof. Sarkari, in charge of Student Gym, called the five members of the board of Technik. He took us to task about over-running the budget and threatened to write to our parents to get the excess Rs. 5,000 from them. We shat bricks with images of parents descending on campus wondering what the hell were we doing when we were sent to Powai to become engineers.( Rs 5, 000 in those days would have funded three years of IIT existence for a student.)
We protested that we were not in charge (officially). Good excuse in politics but it did not wash in this arena. For a couple of months we went around the campus with the Damocles sword hanging on our heads wondering when it will descend, but the good-hearted Parsi’s bark proved to be worse than his bite and my Dad never found out that his son was already into misappropriation of funds. Otherwise he would not have funded my MBA in Finance.
In January when the dust had settled, Technik ran an article entitled “Will the real Colin Gonsalves please stand up?” decrying his and Salil Gutt’s absence from the organising scene. I got so much flak from my classmates for bad-mouthing them that it made my ears ring.
By,
Kirat Patel ( C’75 )