Riviera. Even if you have experienced just one edition of this phenomenon, I bet just the mention of the word gives you chills. Riviera is one of India’s largest international sports and cultural festivals. Every part of this fest lives up to its name. The hype never fizzles out, it stays till the end and translates to memories you would hold onto for life. The build up to this fest involves a lot of premium events like Agaaz - a stand-up comedy event - and regional events like Sahiti and Sangamam to name a few. The four days of the fest oversee events like Aikya that showcase India’s cultural diversity to events like Infusion that authenticate the international nature of the fest. Of course, the Proshows, where superstars from across the country enthral the thousands gathered by their musical performances and charisma, are the most awaited of all events.
However, I have had two distinctly different kinds of experiences as a participant and when I was entrusted with the management of this magnanimous event. I will be describing my experience when I got a first-hand look into everything that goes on behind the curtains of the huge carnival that Riviera is. Being one of the select few Organisers of the most celebrated event of the year on a campus of 40000 plus students has its privileges and even more so, it’s responsibilities. Unlike some other Organisers on the team, I hadn’t dreamt of becoming an organiser since my first year. As I was part of the table tennis team, I joined the sports committee of Riviera’19 on the recommendation of a senior who was a manager in the committee. I made an effort to understand everything that was going around and enjoyed the whole experience a lot and so felt confident about applying for Organiser post the following year.
Cut to next year, I got the post, and was elated to have made it. I smiled like an idiot looking at the Organisers’ post that was out on Facebook, I had no clue what the next 3 months or so had in store for me. Here’s the thing, following instructions is so much different than taking decisive calls that would prove pivotal to how the event eventually turned out. I had this blueprint in my head of how things worked from the year before, which I had to do away with as soon as we were entrusted with our first task, “The Budget”. I am not going to talk numbers here but hey! I knew at that point that we had to go to work at once. The Faculty in charge hardly had any idea of how things worked on the ground, but of course, they had to deal with the pressure of keeping up with the demands of the college management. To put things in perspective, their suggestions were like suggesting a cook who’s struggling to put together “Dal Chawal” to prepare a three-course meal. Saying that the logistics were hard to figure out is an absolute understatement. Also, different faculty in charge of different departments prioritised different things. There were times we were waiting for approvals and working deadlines simultaneously and nothing really gave, so we just waited till something or someone did. All this seems funny now, but it was scary then, mostly everything that we did was a risk, a judgement call. We made certain deadlines by the thinnest of margins, hell, we didn’t even make some, we just didn’t let anyone know.
We were working really hard for this to work. For someone who’s slept 14 hours straight before it was painful to set an alarm for 6 hours of sleep and then wake up to a call from an unknown number that said “When is the cricket tournament maa”, an hour before the alarm went off. While I just had this, my co-organiser, Arushi had to work through placements and MBA entrances as well, making that story an interesting read as well.
There were all kinds of funny mishaps. We were to conduct cricket on the weekends for internal students and someone went off with the stumps that one of the Physical department faculty had gotten. At another time, the medals got locked in a cupboard, the keys to which we had lost. Let alone our committee, there was so much commotion almost everywhere, and all the “jugaad” that everyone did to get through it. We had a lot of fun times though, the night slips where we partly worked and mostly played volleyball or basketball or just did some fun activity with the juniors. We even painted the walls of the Control Room black and if you are wondering how we had the time to do that, I can explain. We couldn’t do our work because it was dependent on some other committee and theirs on some other committee and theirs was probably pending approval from someone.
All of this and then working with our committee which had 10 managers (4th years), 35 coordinators (3rd years) and 35 volunteers (1st and 2nd years). Not everyone was in it for the love of sports like you would expect from any sportsperson. To few, ODs and food coupons served as good enough incentives. It took time to get everyone on the same page and figure out which person was best suited to do what kind of work, but eventually everything fell in place and we grew really tight as a group. Most of the members started to stick around, got the work done, followed instructions clearly and made brilliant suggestions. If we didn’t at the beginning, we surely felt like a team by the end of it. A clear marker of our success was participation from external participants. When there were about 10 days for our events to start, we were nowhere near our target but we didn’t lose hope and boy did things turn around for us. We got an absolutely overwhelming response from external participants in the last few days and then had to give it all we had left to manage those many participants.
I learned so much. I learned to get work done from someone who hardly wanted to do it. I learned the importance of saying we instead of me. I learned to somehow understand Tamil and reply in English (Yes or No), to milk a good something out of nothing, to show everything was super fine when the wheels had come off and to stay strong when everything went south for us. If you ask me whether I would want to go back and do things differently, I would say absolutely! If anyone else said otherwise, they didn’t learn anything from all of the experiences they had. Does that mean I regret how I went about it? Absolutely not! I did what best I could to make this edition of Riviera the success that it was.
In retrospect, I would say I am really proud of the effort that we put in and the success we achieved as a team.
I made new friends. Though they were people I didn’t know existed till the work for the fest started, they felt like I had known them for years. We created bonds that will last a lifetime. I feel, it’s important to appreciate the lows to really feel the highs and so I will cherish every small detail about those 3 months that I would give absolutely anything to relive.
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