The story of my experiments with Pragyan

As a disclaimer I must admit that it is not just me but a small team of us who´ve done the experiment and everything bad must be hurled at all of us equally For the good ones... I am always there!

We worked towards Pragyan for almost a year and many weird and creative ideas were brought up in this course of time; while some survived, many never made it to Pragyan´10. And now that Pragyan is over I feel its time to let the cat out of the bag.

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1. Abhinav ka Swayamvar

Probably the most weirdo publicity idea ever in a techfest, but Pragyan was determined to gain a strong ground within the NITT campus.

Inspired by Sir Richard Branson´s strategies, and also ´Rakhi ka Swayamvar´ this unique publicity model was devised by me! With the number of female fans of the Pragyan ´chocolate-boy chairman´ growing by the hour, it was planned to have a one day reality show in EEE Audi or Barn stage challenging the girls of 2nd year UG to fight it out for a date with our KursiPurush.

But due to fear of excessive competition and predicted increase in the number of in-campus patients suffering from mental trauma (those who fail to win the challenge) the idea was called off based on the recommendation of WHO. It is understood from Opal that a bunch of girls had already started preparing themselves for the event and hence were mighty disappointed at its cancellation.

2. Controversies and Conspiracies

In our attempt to devise a new scheme for ´effective publicity´ Mradul and I came up with this idea of publicising through controversies. The possible controversies we thought of included,

a. Hacking into a secured server and mailng the pragyan participants,
b. Being the first to release a controversial news (´The Almighty´ style),
c. Writing a controversial book on the flaws in the college education system of the country,
d. Bringing down a very controversial speaker to the campus and make him talk on something very very infalmmatory,
e. Demanding a separate statehood for NIT Trichy and making Pragyan its official festival (holidays!!! ),
f. Joining hands with a local political party for joint youth operations ahead of Pragyan to ensure good media coverage.


Majority of these ideas were rejected on the grounds of possible criminal cases in the future against the Pragyan orgainsers and since our already packed schedule did not give us the time for the jail adventure, we had to call off ´Operation CnC´.

3. For the flyers

Pragyan is an international techno-management festival conducted in the area that falls in the landing zone of the flights that are about to land in the Tiruchi international airport. To capitalise on this Mradul came up with this amazing idea of writing Pragyan 2010 in big, bold letters on the road from CLC to SBI ATM so that the people on the flight will notice it and thus the participation for Pragyan will increase!

¨What an idea Sirji!¨

4. Vada Pav Stall

Since majority of the core members of this Pragyan have lived in Bombay and have at least once longed for Vada Pav in Trichy, a collective decision was taken to have a Vada Pav stall from Bombay during Pragyan. Arya, the head of Marketing team was forced to hunt for prospective vada pav sellers who could bring their stock to Trichy during Pragyan.

But this idea was dropped after the members of the marketing team failed miserably in explaining to these vada pav sellers the location of Trichy, which they thought was not a part of mainland India !

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These are just some of the many ideas that we thought of implementing in Pragyan´10. Of course there are these other ideas that were more serious type and which were actually implemented during Pragyan!

But who wants to boast about them ?!

Mradul Sharma and the Post-Pragyan syndrome

Mradul Sharma is the head of Pragyan ´10 Publicity team. He is placed in Mu Sigma where he dreams of working with loads of data! He has worked a lot for Pragyan and at one point like most of us he too was ´Pragyanified´.

Back here in NITT a person is said to be ´Pragyanified´ if he/she does regular night outs in Octa, retains a constant status msg www.pragyan.org on gtalk, is seen wearing the same t shirt for days together, dines everyday at bamboos and suffers a nervous breakdown at the mention of ´Admin´. (Results of intense research on the topic by (wannabe-) Dr. Kushal Jain of ICE Dept., NIT Trichy)

Now lets see how Mradul was also ´post-Pragyanified´ and why he had sleeples nights after Pragyan!

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MRADUL´S DREAM (NIGHTMARE? ) ON THE NIGHT AFTER PRAGYAN

¨Dean Students¨
¨Thriteen Rupees¨
¨NIT Trichy¨
¨Pragyan¨
¨You are fired¨
.
.
The year is 2012. The place is Bangalore. The location is a fully furnished office in the heart of the city. On the wall is written ´Mu Sigma - Do the math´.

Mradul is fired from Mu Sigma after two years of rigourous data analysis work because they have just received a letter from the Dean Students of NIT Trichy that a bill for Rs. 13/- has not been settled by Mradul after Pragyan´10! Since no amount of explanation seems to help his case, Mradul has to put in his papers!

He wakes up in a state of shock and horror only to find himself still in NIT Trichy!

ON THE NEXT NIGHT...

The year is 2010 and it is day 2 of Pragyan. Mradul is taking a break in A11hall and was enjoying a small nap when...

...Anand Krishnan (Head of Guest Lectures team) storms into the room and catches Mradul by the collar and yells ¨Its Dr. Bhargava´s lecture and there is no one in EEE Auditorium! Go get me some people at the venue! ¨

Mradul jumps out of his bed at 1:30 in the morning not knowing what to do!
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So friends, here we see how Pragyanified people have a greater probability of suffering from ´Post-Pragyanified´ symptoms that is usually accompanied by a feeling of complete joblessness, an intense urge to stare blankly into the computers in Octa graphics lab, Sleeplessness until 2 in the morning, loss of appetite and most importantly a deep desire to trouble the (paavam-) Treasurer asking reimbursements!


Cheers!