When you organise something, you are understandably tense. And when it is something on as grand a scale as the Tata Steel Trailblazers conclave, the tension is very natural. One small mistake, and things can go south. You have athletes and sponsors to look after, your viewers and listeners are following your every move, and you can’t slip up. It does take a toll on you. The truth is, I could barely sleep the three days of the conclave.
In a period of high stress, you do need your moments. You need to unwind and find ways of doing so. One laugh makes a difference, and stays with you as your conclave memory. On the second morning at around 9:35am, I asked one of our video editors, Avinaba Mukherjee, to check with Trisha Ghosal if she had informed the speakers of the first panel to come down to the auditorium.
The session was to start at 9:45am and it was about time. He came back within a minute and said to me the LED screens were all on. I was stunned. What was he saying, and why? He then went on to say that all the speakers in the auditorium were already on. That’s when the penny dropped, and I couldn’t stop laughing. I told Avinaba I did not mean the sound-box speakers, and had requested him to ask Trisha to call the panellists (speakers!).
The second incident I want to write about here wasn’t remotely funny to start with. Now, in hindsight, none of us can stop laughing. Soon after the conclave was over, my colleague Rohan Chowdhury came running to me and said he couldn’t find his laptop, which was at the registration desk. We searched everywhere with no result. The joy of having pulled off a successful conclave gave way to anxiety, because the laptop had a lot of key data.
Immediately, we decided to check the CCTV cameras at the ITC and, to our pleasant surprise, we were able to identify the thief. Even more surprising was what followed. The man was relaxing in the hotel lobby with a bagful of conclave goodies, and the laptop. It was ITC security that spotted him, and within a few minutes, he had confessed to stealing a lot of things over the course of the three days.
When Trisha, our head of production at RevSportz, mentioned the incident to her mother, who had come to watch the conclave, she looked shocked. How could someone enter the gift room without proper accreditation was what she rightly asked. She then went on to say that there was security outside the room all through the three days. “Never was the room left unattended,” said Trisha’s mother. “I have seen someone wearing a blazer and a pink T-shirt with accreditation round his neck each time I passed the gift room.”
Trisha instantly realised what she was saying. She showed her mother the photo of the man ITC had apprehended from the hotel lobby, and the truth dawned on us that the man in question had stolen an all-access accreditation from the registration desk, and was actually masquerading as a security guard outside the gift room.
When the story was narrated to me, there was little that I could do except smile and say in Aamir Khan style, “All is Well, All is Well.”
Also Read: The Trailblazers Conclave and our behind-the-scenes champions