The Cultural Fest I Helped Organize Almost Broke the College. Here Is the Full Story.

I was on the technical team for Incident, NIT Surathkal's cultural fest, in my second and third years. In my third year I was the technical head, which is a title that sounds important and means you are responsible for every piece of equipment, every live stream, every screen, every light, every microphone, and every situation that arises when one of these things does not work in front of five thousand people. I want to describe what two days of this actually looked like.

The Budget Problem

The fest budget was approved in August for an event in February. By October, inflation in celebrity performance fees had moved enough that the artist our cultural committee had quoted in August was now asking for 40% more. The cultural committee wanted to absorb this by cutting the technical budget. The technical budget was already tight. This produced a negotiation that I was not senior enough to lead and senior enough to be asked to participate in, which is a specific kind of uncomfortable.

We eventually absorbed 15% of the increase from technical and renegotiated the artist's team on catering and logistics. The artist eventually did not come. She sent a team representative three days before the event to say she had a conflicting engagement. The cultural committee handled this with remarkable composure. We replaced her with two smaller acts from the college circuit who were genuinely good and who charged a combined 30% of what she had been quoted.

Day One: What Actually Broke

The main stage sound system developed a ground loop hum at 6 PM, two hours before the headline performance. This is a problem I had read about and never solved in production. We had an electrician on call who diagnosed it in twenty minutes and told us he needed a part that was available in Mangalore, which is 40 kilometres away. Someone drove to Mangalore. The part arrived at 8:15 PM. The performance started at 9 PM. These times were planned for 8 PM. We told nobody outside the technical team.

The live stream dropped twice because the internet at the main stage dropped twice. This was a vendor problem that I could not fix and should have had a backup plan for. I did not have a backup plan. I learned about the necessity of backup plans for single points of failure in a way that I have not needed to relearn since.

What Made It Worth It

By midnight on the second day, when the fest was over and we were breaking down equipment, there was a specific quality of exhaustion in the technical team that felt like something earned. We had kept the lights on and the sound working for 90% of an event that 5,000 people had attended. The 10% failures were invisible to most of them. The knowledge that we had held the whole thing together was ours. Nobody wrote about the technical team in any of the post-fest coverage. I have never minded this.