Snapshots from MIT

My undergraduate experiences at Madras Institute of Technology, 1996-2000

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

MITAFEST 97

MIT Athenaeum FESTival was our annual cultural extravaganza, spread over 4 days. Although it could not match something like Saarang in grandeur and opulence, it used to be our pride. As they say in Tamil, Ezaikku Eththa eLLurundai.

My association with MITAFEST 97 began with getting sponsorships for events. I undertook many trips with other batchmates to several business and vocational training establishments trying to get them to sponsor some events. I was moderately successful and I was quite pleased about that.

MITAFEST 97 was inaugurated on a Wednsesday afternoon. We had an intra-college cultural competition, just to set the mood and get everybody excited for the next four days. We being the first year students, prepared and participated eagerly in it. Our show consisted of a dance for the song, "antha arabic kadalOram..", another dance for an african style tribal song and finally a poem recital by me. I still remember the mesmeric dance movements by my batchmates Ilangovan, Sarath and Shivasai for the arabic kadalOram song. As we were the first set of plus2 students to enter college, we had an abundance of youthful exuberance which was definitely different from the casual attitudes of our seniors, all of them having completed B.Sc before coming here. It was truly a mind-blowing dance performance. My poem was titled "engkaL MIT" and I sang copious praises of the college in it. Most of it was true of course. It drew wide applause all round.

The next day morning, we got news that we won second prize for the culturals. It was a creditable performance and we were all very elated. We enthusiastically participated in all events and organisational activities there-after. We had inter college variety show on that evening and it was a blast. Loyola and Nandhanam Arts, the usual leaders in these events everywhere did so well. I was wearing an ear-ring for the occasion and was doing all sorts of alambals.

The next day, the notable event was Vaarththai Vilaiyaattu, conducted by our alumnus Ramesh Prabha, who is popular in Sun TV with his Paattukku Paattu programme. The rules of the event are that he will keep asking questions, and we must not be silent for more than 3 seconds while answering, must not use English words, must not repeat a word more than thrice, must speak only in complete sentences, etc. I too participated and lost narrowly by 10 seconds in the first round itself.

Dance Dance was a popular event held on the last day. We had two rounds. In the first round, the teams should dance to the song/music piece they had selected and practised for. In the second round, also called Masala Mix Round, we used to play a mix of old and new songs, including melodies, thus testing their impromptu dancing skills to the maximum. The team from St.Peter's engineering college displayed terrific presence of mind in the second round. For every piece that was played, they waited briefly for their leader to start the dance step and easily caught on with him. In the case of other teams, each member of the team danced differently and it was an eye-sore comedy for the audience. St.Peter's won the event, naturally.

As I had mentioned earlier, it was the first culturals experience for our batch and we went slightly over board in excitement. This is especially true with the case of paper planes, which we merrily shot at many girls, including seniors. At that time, it was much fun, but now I am certainly ashamed of the way we behaved. Let's just put it down to young age and innocent enthusiasm, shall we?

(Posted on 21-Feb-2004)

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