My TEDx Life….
-By Sanjana Parikh
The title would sound over ambitious to a lot of people, including me in my sane moments, but my life has been defined by organizing a decent TEDx event for the last six months and hence I took this liberty. For me, deciding to be a part of this event had a lot to do with the fact that Dr. Margie Parikh had taken up the responsibility to organize it.
Most of us are familiar with the role a curator plays in a gallery or museum. But it wasn’t until I started closely following the nearby TEDx events that I realized that curation was not only a part of organizing conference and talks — but it was vital!
For me curation is about using the content of your event to tell a story or to communicate a message to your audience. We have all been to events that seem disjointed and you end up not really understanding what the point is.
Without an overarching story your audience and speakers can feel lost. Thinking about curation instead of just pieces of isolated content involves having to brief and engage your speakers before the event. They need to understand and be on board with the story you want to tell.
I was repeatedly told that great curation can leave the audience energized and excited! So how do you do this? For me it started by asking myself a few questions like “What do I want the audience to walk away with? What feelings do I want to elicit in the audience?What order or flow will tell the most coherent and compelling story?”
One common mistake that I might have made had it not been the guidance of Margie madam would have been in a way of how I brief the speakers. It is essential to be careful not to make the speakers feel like they need to shoehorn your theme or title into their talks. Briefing the speakers like this could end up making all the content sound the same or repetitive. What I learnt here through observation was that good curation is subtler and involves finding out what your speakers can and want to speak about and asking them to draw our specific ideas that fit a part of the overarching story. It is about a journey, each point being different but each building on the last and coming together to take the audience to your desired destination.
Coming up with the idea to organize TEDx and Margie ma’am announcing the idea and asking the students about their thoughts towards this, was the beginning of the show.
We very early on realized that the term volunteer means you are offering your services for free, but by showing a willingness to support and gaining valuable experience at the same time. A lot of students had turned up, all equally enthusiastic about the idea of TEDx. Yet there were a lot of questions as well. Sessions after sessions we all came together to improvise the existing matter and develop new ideas. With the license being handed to us officially, the celebratory mood enhanced, and the event preparation kick started in literal terms. There was this one point that we were not so sure about. The license of number of attendees was limited to only 100. But then that is the beauty of 100-person events too, they’re more intimate, if the crowd feels they’re there for a reason, for a broad view of a topic, they’ll be engaged.
The first few rounds included coming up with the theme, the title, the tag line and the idea we would be concentrating on. It was once we finalized the central idea that we realized how much wider scope our topic actually had than we originally presumed. With the theme and idea in place, we started to short list the possible personalities that have in a way or other been affected or have imbibed it very evidently in their lives and would be willing to share it with the attendees in a way that would inspire them.
The speaker search began with the search committee coming up with about 50 names as the probable list that would be approached first. The list was pretty mixed in nature in the sense that the speakers were of all diverse fields, as well as were ranging from highly popular to fresh entrants. One of the important questions in this phase was to decide what we wanted our final outcome to be, since the selection of speakers was based absolutely on the approach to this particular issue. With all of that in place, we started going to personally meet the speakers. As the curators of the event, l and Utsavi got to go to all the places to meet these wonderful people. What was absolutely amazing was the fact that we met only around 14 speakers and finalized 12 out of those. Each of them was so spectacular that we returned back more than satisfied after each of these meetings. The credit for this must entirely be given to the organizer ma’am and the search committee who pulled off the job of prioritizing the names so effectively.
While we were communicating with the speakers, we also began the work of gathering the sponsors for the show. It’s a lot of work, but it’s possible. Keeping it simple, we started small, getting sponsors to give us their products and services free, with a promise to attend to their needs of recognition and deliver great videos. Along this, we had also started our digital platforms going online. We initially thought that starting a Facebook page and doing some tweeting would quickly get us some hundreds of followers and an eager team of volunteers from which we could pick the best. WRONG! We got some good volunteers and some dead weight. Fortunately, we had people who could handle the technical side of the production.
It so happened that in the way of organizing this event, we faced many unprecedented challenges, but in an absolutely amazing way, the zest to make this event a memorable one kept on rising with each roadblock. There’s this word called “KAIZEN” in Japanese language, which someone had introduced to me coincidentally during this time. Kaizen is the Japanese philosophy of continually improving all functions. Literally, it means “good change”. So, all the while working in this event, I was eager to scrutinize every detail in the process before, during and after events, aiming to improve the entire experience and the way my team mates and I collaborate. I also had a very funny feeling that Margie madam had kept me by her side because she believed in my critical judgement skills.
Working in such events, I have met a lot of people who share a passion for what they do. Many people doing exactly what they dreamt of doing once. Sure enough, working in events is not always 100% fun, there are dull tasks, too, and it is stressful. At the end of the day, every event has a deadline. The nearer it draws, the more hectic it gets. But nothing beats the feeling when an event comes to life as planned, and when you can share these moments with a team of like-minded people who have been working long hours to make that moment happen.
It was over six months of constant brainstorming over ideas, speakers, decoration, set-up that I very sincerely hope gets culminated into what I believe to be finest event of my knowledge.
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