Saarang is the IIT Madras cul-fest, and readers from outside IITM might find the context missing. Please bear with me.

Any critique of Saarang must begin with a discussion of the stated and unstated objectives of Saarang. In my perception, they are – promotion of a culture of intellectualism amongst students, giving students a break from academics by providing opportunities for other (equally intellectual) activities, letting students manage their own affairs and educating students about the cultural heritage of the world.

What it ought not to be about – giving students an opportunity to have fun, restoring the gender ratio of the institute for a few days and getting famous people to come to the institute. Of course, students have a right to have fun, and boys have a right to ogle at girls (or boys, or both) – but not at institute expense.

I do not contest that standards in many events are very high. But overall, it will not be an overstatement to say that Saarang primarily attempts to achieve the latter set of objectives rather than the former. In doing so, it also causes a lot of collateral damage to human eardrums, animal habitats and the general serenity of the campus. By all objective criteria, Saarang deserves to be replaced by a better alternative. And yet it makes two claims that make it impregnable – financial independence and popular approval.

Financial independence is a myth that can be easily repudiated. Saarang could not afford a tenth of the facilities made available to it from the institute if it were to pay the market rates for these facilities. The myth of financial independence has been very carefully created, amongst other reasons, to avoid accountability under the RTI. But reality is clearly different, and we all know that.

Saarang does not enjoy across the board approval, as some of the smail messages show. But even if it did, I would consider this popularity irrelevant. Essentially, since Saarang happens inside IITM and is sponsored by IITM, it follows that Saarang (or any alternative to it) has to be designed to achieve the legitimate objectives of cultural education and not the juvenile wishes of the students. While students are expected to manage the events, what constitutes culture cannot be decided by popular vote.

Vinay ‘Caesar’ Shankar recently wrote in the Hindu that our leadership structure resembles that of a large corporation, with the secretary as the CEO. This comment is very illuminating, for it symbolizes everything that is wrong about our leadership structure and consequently about Saarang.

The top-down hierarchical structure is preferred in corporations for a reason – the ownership of resources is concentrated at the top. In a Governance model, ownership is concentrated at the bottom (amongst citizens and communities), and hence a decentralized system with a bottom-up hierarchy is preferable.

Saarang is essentially an organization of self-governance instituted to achieve definite goals. It is neither a corporation that is owned by those at the top of the pyramid, nor is it the rule of the mob where anything can be justified by popular approval.

However, when power is concentrated in the hands of two secretaries chosen by popular vote, they automatically choose to exercise it in a manner that brings them maximum popularity. A large festival is much more endearing but as Saarang proves, it is not very efficient.

The corporatization of Saarang has been two-fold; on one hand, it is being increasingly being sold off to corporations, on the other hand, it is beginning to resemble a corporation itself (in terms of its organization). The similarities are stark – the disregard for law, which Saarang glaringly exposes year after year when it contemptuously disregards the Supreme Court’s restrictions on loudspeaker use and the exploitation of resources such as institute transport facilities and animal habitats, just to name a few. This irresponsible behaviour is consistently seen in all big organizations; smaller organizations simply don’t have the wherewithal to inflict that sort of damage.

Large festivals also need big money, for which concessions have to be made. This definitely does not hurt the interests of those who run Saarang, but it hurts the cause for which Saarang was envisioned. Sponsors don’t encourage intellectualism; they encourage animal behaviour.

All of this can be traced back to concentration of power in the hands of two persons. But I do not blame the student body alone for this state of affairs. Our Dean might profess great unhappiness that sponsors had the temerity to hold kissing contests during Saarang, but it is the institute’s failure to spend enough on cultural activities that has driven the student body to seek corporate funding. If the institute were to spend on culture half of what it spends on sports, we wouldn’t have to sell our souls.

Another misconception is that all activities have to happen simultaneously in order to achieve good outside participation. We know that this is not true by experience. We have Open Quiz, which is conducted independent of Saarang and there is no dearth of outside participation. Wherever there is quality, participation is always high.

As an alternative, I propose that the institute invites students to form clubs for various extracurricular activities. We already have Speaking Club, Music Club, IVil, Reflections and some others, but we could have many more. Based on the nature of the activity, the institute could provide some allowance, with the club getting the rest from memberships, donations and sponsorships.

There is, in fact, no need for a Cultural Secretary. Instead, we will have autonomous clubs, organized democratically, doing their best to promote their activity. Every now and then a few of them may team up to have a small festival and invite outside participants, but a majority of the activities will be aimed at the students of the institute. For e.g. we might have a music festival that organizes competitions for different genres of music or something along the lines of Bharat Utsav etc.

I believe my model will succeed because it identifies the interest groups that are likely to achieve the aforementioned goals, and places the power in their hands. A committee of professors will decide the quantum of institute sponsorship and regulation of activities, and the deliberations of this committee will be made public and open to criticism.

Of course, we will lose out on the big money, the big names and the publicity that come along with Saarang. But we won’t need the money, so it won’t hurt. Pro-shows will cease to exist as we know them, but there will be concerts, hopefully by people who have a something more substantial to offer than a larger-than-life image.

These reductions might seem too severe to some of us. My claim is that despite these reductions, or perhaps because of them, the objectives of having a cultural festival will be better served by not having one. Small, in my opinion, is not just beautiful; it is also efficient.

Posted by KRC. | Permalink |