Engineering College Techfests suck. With all their sponsors and their cool names and DJ’s (coming all the way from Portugal), they always turn out to be a disappointment.

We have competitions, side events, and ‘register (aka pay) for two events, and get a useless workshop free!) offers. Students somehow find wandering around in unknown colleges, and exhorting random students to ‘build their portfolio’ and ‘participate in extra-curricular activities’ a learning experience. I know very few professions which involve asking people to give you something for nothing. And I sincerely hope, that these are not the professions which engineers want to undertake for the better part of their lives. (But hey- engineers can (and therefore must) do anything (and apparently, everything))

Consider a typical 3 day fest. On the first day, college can be seen to be full of swarms of volunteers moving around, clicking pictures and generally having a superb boring time. On the second day, they rest. Instead, we have unsuspecting fools from other colleges moving around, confused, asking for a place in the college which no-one has ever heard of.

B-List celebrities come and get humiliated, their voice lost in a strategically planned collective clapping maneuver. With good practice, students become experts at such techniques. True masters have the power to rally the whole crowd, and launch an admiration offensive on the speaker.

Hence, techfests are my favourite.

But on the eve of our college’s ‘tech’ fest, I noticed something I had not noticed before. I saw people who hadn’t known each other a few weeks ago working hard together. Tired and sleepy. Performing menial tasks. Putting up hoardings of sponsors they had fooled with their honeyed promises of high footfall. But working. Working with determination, happy to be a part of something bigger.

I suppose it counts for something.

Note: ‘My college’, ‘Fools’, ‘Sponsors’ and ‘Technical Festivals’ are purely fictional objects, people or constructs. Anyone thinking otherwise- remember that it is your mind which is drawing paralells between fact and fiction