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College fest-evolve: Students are facing off over memes, rap, Insta filters
Campus festivals are changing to embrace contemporary talents, skills and tech.
College festivals are a big deal. For many students, they’re launch-pads for talent, as festivals offer opportunity and incentives to perform.
And they’ve always experimented with new attractions, switching dated events for those that are topical, unique and popular. Ruby Pavri, 50, who has been a professor at St Xavier’s College for about 25 years, has watched its annual college festival, Malhar, evolve steadily since it was instituted in 1979.
“College festivals give students room to push the creative envelope and hone their planning, management, leadership and people skills. Students enjoy thinking up events that mirror the latest trends,” she observes. “Instead of written poetry contests, there is now competitive slam poetry. This year, there was a DJing competition.”
This year, across colleges, festival committees have looked to memes, climate change, hip hop and even web shows for inspiration, crafting line-ups that are on-trend and woke.
FINGER ON THE PULSE
Naishar Shah, 19, vice-chairperson of Kshitij, Mithibai’s annual festival held in December, explains why they chose Eternal Evolution as the theme. “Focusing on change seemed like the right thing to do because we’re experiencing a lot of it lately; the economy and people’s standards of living are changing, we’re battling climate change, our understanding of gender and sexuality is changing, as is the entertainment of today.”
In keeping with the theme, they’re holding a Green Run – a marathon to improve awareness about sustainable living. Participants will run wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan: Run for a cleaner, greener India. Mithibai’s campus, the start and end points of the marathon, will be fitted with eight handmade cardboard dustbins, into which runners can drop off their bottles and food packets for recycling.
Unusually, the fest will also hold a day-long IPL auction in which eight teams will place hypothetical bids for cricketers who were part of IPL 2019. “Teams are assigned a mock budget and their dream 11 must include three foreign players, one left-handed batsman and a right-handed wicket-keeper,” says Shah. Cricket knowledge, budgeting skills and foresight will help you win, he adds. They’re also holding ScriptCom, in which participants must create alternative plotlines for scenes from trending sitcoms like Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Modern Family.
Kanav Gupta, 21, competitions head of IIT Bombay’s Mood Indigo festival held in December, says that event planning teams have tried to acknowledge the way the virtual world creates its own culture. Last year, they invited college students from all over India to compete to create Mood-I-inspired filters for Snapchat. The winning filter was added to the app during the four days of the festival. “This year, we’ve asked participants to create a 5-minute Vine video and upload it on social media platforms using the right hashtags. The winning criteria is yet to be decided,” says the third-year BTech student.
Detour 2019, Jai Hind’s BMM fest scheduled for early December, will have an ‘Insert Memes Here’ contest. “Participants get one hour to make six memes that will be judged on the basis of their humour. But we see to it that they aren’t offensive as memes infamously tend to be,” says Yashvi Yagnik, chairperson of the fest.
STREET-SMART
With the 2019 blockbuster film Gully Boy, hip-hop culture went from margin to mainstream and now, colleges are scrambling to include events that celebrate it. BITS Pilani’s Waves 2019, which was held in November, introduced Rapsody, a platform to showcase students’ rapping skills. Sizzle, their solo street dance event, was held on a street that falls within the college’s premises, so that the crowd could cheer participants on as they battled it out with impromptu moves.
Jai Hind College’s event, Rapture the Beat, gets teams of one beatboxer and rapper to face-off with extempore rebuttals. To up the underground vibe, this year’s event will take place in the college’s basement as a freestyle rapping session in which rappers form a circle and take turns to rap.
Another event embodying street culture is Kshitij’s 7 to Smoke, a trending beatboxing and street dance event in which participants have to ‘smoke out’ their opponents with their moves to win the prize.
And what’s a college festival in 2019 without stand-up comedy? Waves’ flagship event, Show Me the Funny, has elimination rounds in Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Pune, Bengaluru. Famous comedians like Kanan Gill, Biswa and Khamba are invited as judges. Madhulika Balakumar, media and marketing head of Waves, says the college gets an average footfall of 60,000 students and participation of 200 plus colleges. Naturally, they want events that stand out, and surpass events at rival colleges. “Dance, music and art events are crowd-favourites,” she says. “But the way to get more students to attend is to introduce a new event that incorporates the latest trends.”
It’s not just the event line-up that has undergone a makeover; the prizes have too. “Previous prizes for the best college have either been objects, like a Play Station, or all-expense paid holidays,” says Shah. “This year, it is an e-scooter,” says Shah.
Vikramaditya Mohanty, 20, a second-year law student who rapped in public for the first time at Rapsody, says that topical events help upcoming artists hone their skills. Manasvee Motiwalla, a class 12 student and a jazz funk, contemporary and hip hop dancer, agrees. “7 to Smoke was a really cool event because it gave me a chance to showcase jazz funk moves, a style that’s not very popular yet,” she says.
