Where it All Started..

Statutory warning: Read this post when you have a lot of time and patience ;)

This is the second draft of my post. The first one was deleted because of an unfortunate power cut when I was half way through! But nevertheless, I still don't mind putting all those thoughts down once again :)

Well we've been in the college for almost four years now, and officially entered the department three years ago. We'd never had any real, person-to-person interaction with the lecturers, the juniors, heck our own batch mates in the other section! There was never any platform for us to interact or showcase the enormous hidden talents (believe me.. there are LOTS!).

Then came the idea of starting off with a freshers' party in our seventh semester. A lot of planning was done, lots of opinions considered. But we all know how that turned out :P It wasn't that it was a bad idea or anything, we just didn't get enough support! 'Whose' support is not really important, as all of us are in a better place now :)

As we stepped into the last semester of our engineering lives, most of us had that urge to do something big, something memorable, something which would set a trend. That is what turned out to be the wonder: CieSta '09!

When someone decides to do something good, you find more people who would rather pull them down than encourage them. Some of them are jealous, some acrimonious, and some others who talk crap just for the heck of it! I'm sure most of us were faced with such people, some within the branch, most outside.

There were many more glitches to come. First came the problem of fixing up the date for the fest. It HAD to be the weekend after Ugadi, as there was a multitude of other fests to follow! That was the first shot in our arms. Being a long weekend, we speculated that the auditorium might not even be half-filled! Little did we know that all our negative speculations would be proven wrong! :) Then there was the task of convincing the juniors to stay back for the fest, or atleast come back a day or two earlier so that we'd have some participation from our own people. We even had to beg and plead with them, but I'd still say the response from one particular batch was more than disappointing! (I've decided not to divulge in details, but if they're reading I bet they'll know it's THEM I'm talking about!)

Then came an even bigger blow. We were supposed to conduct the fest WITHOUT any sponsorship! Never had we ever heard of something like this, but still there was that determination to go on and prove all those people, who thought we couldn't do it, wrong. But most importantly we wanted to prove to ourselves that we are actually capable of going through and completing what we'd started off, no matter what barricades were put up in our way!

The most important factor that leads to the success of any fest is proper organization. And most of the times it turns out to be a case of too many cooks! To our good luck we found a group of highly talented, patient and efficient leaders. The minute they took charge, everything fell into the right place!

As Bharat has mentioned, the actual boost came when the posters came out. The sheer joy of finding such unique, exclusive and colourful poster pumped us all up! (I personally love the NAUTANKI poster, with Sada popping out of it ;)) Credits to Mithilesh, Sameer (the poster boys :P) and the whole team!

It was decided that all the committees would be headed by a senior and would have the required juniors working under them. It wasn't really that tough putting the seniors in-charge. Finding volunteers was pretty hard! But the number of people who turned up was just right to fill all the requirements :)

A never lasting debate on whether to have a Fashion Show or not creeped up again, and at the very last moment of finalizing the cultural schedule, it was decided to go ahead with it. Turned out to be a pretty good decision :) Credits to all people who insisted on going ahead with it!

Another idea was to come up with offbeat names for the events. Hence came up the names:

Skit competition: Nautanki.. full kooLe macha!
Antakshari: Oooo la la!
Answer the previous question: Ghajini
Dumb Charades: Ssshhhh!!!.. actions speak louder than words
Entertainment quiz: EQ.. test your entertainment quotient
How well do you know your best friend: Aptamitra.. mera yaar, meri zindagi
Blind SMS contest: Typo.. how fast can you msg.. blind!

Another interesting event was 'Lage Raho', a questionnaire about the CS department. It had some pretty interesting questions, and was a way of people getting to know facts about the juniors, seniors and the lecturers! The credit here goes to DP :)

On the insistence of a few very interested juniors, we decided to have Cricket matches and Volleyball matches. I bet none of us had an idea how athletic the lecturers were! They really surprised all of us! :)

Everyone present on the two days knows how the event turned out. To say it was a 'grand success' still wouldn't do justice! What we had started off to do, we had finally accomplished it! Even those peevish people who had ridiculed us had to finally acknowledge the fact that we were successful :) CieSta has set the trend, and that is evident from the sudden emergence of other branches to 'show everyone what they too can do'! (No offence guys ;))

I was supposed to rewrite this post last night, i.e. on the 30th of March, a day after the fest. And that's when a storm hit me! Before I could realize what was happening, it had me totally engulfed in it. It was the sudden realization that it was actually ALL OVER! How those two days had come and gone never occurred to most of us. I guess we all were a little too busy focusing on what to do and how to do it. It never dawned upon us that this was our actual last 'celebration' in college!

When I could finally clear my mind a little, I sought the help of a few friends, talked my heart out. Then it became evident that I wasn't the only one sufferring from a post-CieSta depression! There were atleast 20 more people with me. And that made me feel a little better :)

I hope the juniors understand our intention behind having this fest. It really meant a LOT to us. It gave us a place to interact, a place to expose talent, a place to get to know more people, a place where we could really be US! The end result was beyond our expectation, and I will be ever grateful to all those people who helped us out. These were two amazingly wonderful days, and the best two days we've had in college :)

There are some people who deserve special mention for making the fest happen. The first would be Santhosh Sir. If it wasn't for him I bet we would've had a hundred more problems to face! He really made it a lot easier for us. Then come Satish and Arvind, two extremely potent leaders. If not for them we wouldn't have had the fest in the first place! There are tens of other names I'll have to mention, but it would be unfair to those whose names I might forget ;)

It's our humble request to you juniors that all of you come together every year and keep making CieSta better and better, until it is your turn to say these same things to your juniors ;)

---

-Pavithra Joshi
8th CSB