A ROUND OF APPLAUSE, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN

It's just an inter department culturals, right? Ethiraj conducts some 30 of these things every year. Stella was having an inter-year culturals even as we had ours.

But every year, something spurs the Students Union of Loyola college to make a huge deal of Ovations, the inter department cultural fest.

This year, for example, Ovations had, among other things, a 60ft long stage, celebrities popping up every half an hour or so, a sound system that almost blew your clothes off if you sat too close, a global village,a stunt show and to top it all off, a really trippy laser show.

There were 31 events.

Of course, the show was awesome, everything went almost perfectly smoothly, there were no disputes and it was one huge extravaganza.

But that's usual. Me, I was fortunate enough to observe the human drama that occurred during the organization of Ovations 2009, and that my friends, was worth all the nonsense.

First off, there was Pradeep. Pradeep is the president of the Students Union. He is also the scion of the famous VGP and therefore has no earthly reason to push himself so hard to make Ovations such a big deal. When, out of curiousity I asked him why, he told me "because it's better than sitting in class". As good a reason as any, I suppose. Anyway, Pradeep lured me into the LSU by putting me in charge of a mythical 'cultural panel', and consequently dumping all sorts of random jobs on me and the other people in the panel. Some of these jobs included designing the brochure (all design work to be delivered in half an hour from time of asking, sometimes the previous day... just to make things a little challenging) also the website, the banners, the certificates and random collaterals. Rashan, a certain junior who is aspiring to become President of Loyola 2010 ended up doing things like typing out the Union car pass list.

Eventually, when the time came, Rashan wrote the rules for all the events, charted out the schedule, put everything in place for the department meetings and generally ensured that everything went smoothly. Enter Prem, the Joint Secretary, a person of subhuman intelligence who did nothing productive for the event. Prem becomes extremely insecure that a second year boy, the aforementioned Rashan, is doing lots and lots of productive stuff. He feels that Rashan is making him look bad. So, everytime he sees old Rashan, his blood boils and he disappears to call a meeting with the Dean of Students to discuss, along with the other 'elected members', everyone's specific role in the great scheme of things.


Other highlights include Karthik (the finance secretary), whose hair turned gray, quite literally, in the weeks leading up to Ovations, Naveen, the cool- headed, jovial Kumaran silks boy finally losing his cool and screaming at people, the evening college boys having problems with the cultural panel, Joe Jalma succumbing to the charms of.., Nasiga running around squeaking, Bala, the attendance secretary putting kadala for random women and giving everyone OD, Ramnath raising his hand, Ranjit's Pooran Song being sung on main stage, Santhanam asking Nasiga what she was doing on Saturday night, Sofie being judge for almost every event and Pradeep threatening to expel troublemakers.

Also, my department, due to something my seniors did at Ovations 08, was debarred from participating. My HOD decided that even though I was part of the Union, I shouldn't organize, so I spent most of the culturals sitting in class, texting reminders and instructions to the event coordinators. At the end of the day, no one knows who the cultural panel is, or what we did. Andrew, the Big Man from Advanced Zoology rose brilliantly to the occasion and coordinated everything perfectly, though.


Finally, however, I DID get to say "big bald man dancing on stage" in the microphone, when the Dean danced when everything was done.


So it's ok.