Category: Avina Umashankar Agarwal

I was one of the Heads of Decoration Department, with my co-head worker Muskaan, in a student-led event named Garba Fest. I was really very excited for doing this job. We both had a list of works to be done, which we had divided to help us reduce our burden as well as reduce internal conflicts that could have occurred, although we did work together and helped each other in making decisions.

As decorating things take a lot of end moment efforts and time, we had started planning for things well in advance so that we have a bit less last-minute jobs left. I had the task of making poster for photo-booth background, rangoli and collecting props for photo-booth.   For the work mentioned above I had started working on it from a week before.

The biggest challenge that we had to face was to get a quality work done in low budget. Due to this we had a lot of things from decoration that we either had to remove or reduce the price through bargaining.  This also had increased our task because we wanted things that were not available at low price (even after lot of request made to the shop keeper) and some were not available at even rent. In the end, we had borrowed a few things from our friends (which I am grateful of), a few we got rented (we were lucky enough) and few had to be bought (We tried our best).

On the day of the event, we got the job of all the lights, speakers and fans in place, all the food stalls were set-upped, getting the photo-booth ready with the props, and background posters, and creating rangoli. Many people had appreciated the work that we had done (luckily no one criticized), letting us know our scale of success achieved which made us feel proud of our efforts taken.

Through this activity I had improved my Management and creative skills. I also improved my skills of working with a team. In all, I enjoyed my work and the whole event.

It was a creative workshop, initiated by Champak (a children’s magazine). In this workshop, I developed a new skill of designing layouts (for making year book) using/on technological devices. In this, I had used my previous knowledge and understanding of colour theory and different layout structure (Visual Arts), while designing the cover page. My aim for attending the workshop was to improve my knowledge of use of Visual Arts that would help me in my subject as well as in preparing for designing year book for my next year (another CAS related activity).

We were shown a presentation which was informative, yet not as interesting;  as there were other students as well and a lot of time was taken in explaining things I already knew; also because the site we used was newly developed, by group of students, there were a lot of hazards in learning proper techniques. The most interesting thing in the presentation were a few slides of illusion which gave a lot of interesting ideas for my art works also increased my understanding of illustrating words/pictures.

For this task, we first had to work individually on our devices and later with a group, but because it was bit insipid many people from our group did not participate and many also had left the workshop in middle! This was unexpected and unaccepted but true. This was a result of the workshop going to slow and also because of the technical hazards in the software. In my opinion, if those technical hazards have not had taken place then it would have been a much better and informative workshop.