Spring Fest

Spring Fest
Organisation type	Student Run, Non-Profit Organization
Founded	1960
Place	Kharagpur, India
Institute	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur
Major events	Taal, Pal, Anubhav, Armageddon, Wildfire, Lake Side Dreams, Sargam, Rangmanch, Hasya Kavi Sammelan etc.
Prize money	27 Lakhs
Guests	KK, Shaan, Sukhwinder Singh, Sunidhi Chauhan, Shankar Mahadevan, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Pandit Vishwa Mohan Bhatt
Core members	47
Slogan	The True Spirit of Youth
Website	www.springfest.in

Spring Fest 2008

Spring Fest, popularly known as SF, is the annual social & cultural festival of Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur held during the month of January in the spring semester. The Spring Fest is held for 4 nights and 3 days on the weekend closest to 26 January, India's Republic Day.

Activities

During the fest, students from IIT Kharagpur and from different colleges all over the country participate in a plethora of socio-cultural activities. Most of these are day events which involve dramatics, music and dance competitions, fine-arts contests, quizzes, and other literary events. Judges of the competitions are reputed and famous personalities from different fields and organisations.

Other non-competition based events include Star-Talk which involves talks/conferences by eminent personalities from a variety of fields. The number of these events is particularly large and serves to cater to the very large number of participants — both local as well as from other colleges all over the country.

There are other just-for-kicks events that are kept on running throughout the day and usually provide entertainment to the participants in-between the main events. Some of these events, such as Perpz, the all-day dance floor with a DJ and Frolic-o-Holic are always crowded.

Star Nites

Star-nite in TOAT with the IIT tower visible in the background

The evenings are notable for "Star-Nites" — the biggest events in Spring Fest which usually involve live concerts by some of the most famous musicians and bands in South Asia. The genres of music are wide and varied and involve pop, rock and fusion bands. The venue for these events is the Tagore Open Air Theater (TOAT) which usually gets packed to its full capacity during the "Star-Nites" as the students, faculty members turn up in huge numbers to see the shows. The security for these events is very tight and is managed by the students themselves. For latecomers, it is usually impossible to get a seat inside TOAT and sights such as students hanging on tree branches and on the high TOAT walls to catch a glimpse of the concert are not uncommon. These are some of the biggest concerts in Eastern India and attract a huge number of non-IIT Kharagpur students as well. Famous Indian artistes like Pritam, Kailash Kher, KK, S. P. Balasubramaniam, Shaan, Sunidhi Chauhan, Vishal-Shekhar, Shweta Pandit, Shankar Mahadevan, Shivamani, Sukhwinder Singh and classical performers such as Pandit Debashish Bhattacharya, Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia, L. Sriram, Pandit Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, Pandit Divyang Vakil have performed here. Bands like Kryptos, Parikrama, Euphoria, Indian Ocean, Strings etc. have also been performing here.

International bands like Breathe, the Floyd Sound, Led Zepplica and TesseracT have also performed on the famous Spring Fest stage. Last year's major performance was by Cassini's Division, the alternative rock band from Kolkata that has been featured as the finalist of Channel [V]'s LaunchPad and the renowned Sutasi Festival.

The Event

Notable Events

Eastern Technology Music Society performing at Springfest in January 2008

Last year's SF witnessed India Jazz Suites, featuring Pandit Chitresh Das and Jason Samuels Smith, an explosive collaboration between one of India’s foremost Kathak masters and one of the world’s fastest, Emmy-award winning tap dancers. Also featured is Indian classical night Anubhav.

SF also hosts an inter-collegiate dance competitionCentrifuge. New additions this year include events such as "Get Served", a street dance competition, "SF 201.1 FM", a RJ-ing event, couple of new events in the Dramatics genre among others. SF has always been inaugrated with a live concert by IIT Kharagpur's own eastern musical group — the Eastern Technology Musical Society (ETMS), along with Sanskruthi. This event is held in the Netaji Auditorium (IIT Kharagpur's main indoor auditorium), and being the first event of SF, is very popular.

Another notable event is Wildfire which involves a competition between rock bands from various colleges. The event culminates in the finalists playing in an all-out live concert on the last night of SF.

Another music competition of the fest is Lake Side Dreams, an acoustic western program.

For Indian music buffs, there is a popular eastern music group competition called Sargam.

Notable Guests

Every year many esteemed personalities of different fields from around the country are invited as guests and judges for different events and competitions. Some of the prominent guests to participate in the festival are Makrand Deshpande, Gilad Dobrecky, Dr. Kumar Vishwas, Lilette Dubey, Pt. Debashish Bhattacharya, Kailash Kher, Jim Ankan Deka, Rahat Indori, Nagesh Bhosle, Divya Jagdale, Ankur Deka, Freddie Bryant, Dr. Ashok Viswanathan etc.

Organization

SF is notable for being the largest student event in the country. Due to this, SF is often cited as one of the prime example showcasing the management skills of IITians in general. The fest is also able to attract a reasonable amount of coverage from the electronic and print-media (MTV India and The Telegraph, Kolkata). The core-team is formed around seven to eight months before the event. This team consists of student team heads and members. The team is largely responsible for garnering sponsorship for the event from external agencies, such as companies in India and also conducts publicity of the events throughout colleges in India during the year. During SF, the team performs coordinative tasks to make sure the events run smoothly and the guests and sponsors are catered to.

The individual events are handled by event-specific teams managed by student heads, sub-heads and volunteers. The pre-event tasks, like putting-up of banners, internal publicity, security, student accommodation, transportation, guest reception, and arena design, are distributed among the heads and members of the core organizing team.

Influence on IIT Kharagpur

The regular academic sessions at IIT Kharagpur are known to be intense due to the large number of courses and topics involved which are taught during an extremely short duration. This is taxing for both the students as well as the faculty members and assistant staff. SF provides a welcome respite to the residents of IIT Kharagpur by being rejuvenative and recreational as well as by acting as a mid-session break. Acting as the ultimate wind-out time for KGPians, SF is known not only for its events but also for the general atmosphere of student revelry surrounding the institute. Even after SF ends, casual chats between students regarding the various events and speculations regarding the participants/artistes for the coming year are very common throughout the rest of the academic session.

References

• Spring Fest 2009 on MTV
• Kharagpur's legend
• Spring Fest in the Quarterly Newsletter of IIT Kharagpur
• Spring Fest on IIT Foundation, the Alumni Association of IIT Kharagpur
• Telegraph on Spring Fest 2011

External links

• IIT Kharagpur - official website
• Spring Fest - the official website
• Spring Fest - the official Facebook Page