This is my experience on Mata Amritanathamayi, Amma’s birthday function, Amritavarsham'70 which was held at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Kollam campus

When the birthday date was announced Initially I planned to go home to be with my father who met with an accident a month ago and was at bed rest. Days nearing to the birthday the reopening date was announced and I had 5 days of leave days after the birthday so I immediately decided to stay for amma’s birthday. There is no fun in participating in the function without doing any volunteering, so I joined PR (public relations) team for the volunteering. Long story short on how I became a part of this team- As 95% of the students from my class signed up for department duty(may I help you) I wanted to do something different and more challenging. Earlier when I planned to go home my friend Goutham invited me to join the PR team so I asked him again that I could join the team and I got in. Our team head was Vishnu Vijay chettan who was working there at our campus itself. Under Vishnu chettan there were many sub coordinators and I was working under Alex chettan who was an alumini. He was sweet and cool guy who helped us always. In our team there were three members, Achyut chetta who is my senior doing MCA here at campus. Ganesh who is doing 2nd year BTECH also here at the campus. Our whole PR team basically were issuing ID cards for main stage access. Our team’s work was to collect the number of coordinators and workers for the issuing the ID card, so for that we were given a Excel sheet with list of all main coordinators and we had to call them and collect the details.

First day when I joined the team(3 days before b’day function) I was not communicating well with the team and was not able to progress much of the work. The problem was no one assigning me the work to do, sitting many hours doing nothing I decided to go and ask what my team members were doing. First of all I asked them what they are doing at that moment and slowing started picking up some work. That day past(2 days before b’day function) I started to do much more work that the previous day. On the final day before the b’day function there were so much work left to finish as many coordinators didn’t gave the names. Some coordinators name was repeating in more than one category which made us so confuse. Many from other team also helped us sort the list and around 2 am most of the things were sorted. At that time all the ID cards were received and we started tying the ribbon in the ID cards and finished the work around 4am. Then we went to sleep there at the collage itself as none of us had energy to go hostel and in the hostel there were 10 members in a room. Till the function ended we slept in the collage itself. We got only around 3 hours of sleep daily and a meal a day(we also got snacks from VCC, where they served snacks for volunteers).

Then it’s the first day of the event in the morning all the coordinators came to collect the ID cards and it was such a mess distributing it as the people who didn’t give the names also came. Some how managed and gave many ID cards as all our team members where there at that time. In the evening a guy came and asked me for an extra ID card(he collected his early) and I told him to request it to my coordinator, and it changed his mood all of a sudden and he told me that he is one of the person managing all this. Then only I realised that I made a big mistake that he is one of the sub coordinators and I just denied his request. As I joined the team at the end I didn’t knew all the coordinators. Later in the day Vishnu chettan came and scolded me a little. His name was Aravind chetta. At the end of the day I went to him and apologized and we hugged and became friends. At the end of the first day of the function. On the second day of the function there were not much duty in the morning, in the evening as there were no rush all the security duty on the stage was done by us and coordinators went to take rest. From evening to morning it was all cultural events and there where many students from across India from amrita vidyalayam and was able to talk to them as well. At the end we got darshan at 6am.

The things I learnt from this event is a lot. I learnt the value of sleep and how it affects our day to day tasks. From now I would be trying to get proper sleep. Another thing I learnt is that if there is no proper coordinator for an event or something that is being conducted we should be putting an effort from our side to make things work out like we should be approaching every team members no matter the age and be in friendly manner. By participating events like this its a great opportunity to make new friends and connections. Everytime people won’t be understanding our situation that we are in, but we should be calm and humble at most of the situation. I learnt how to organize an event and it’s very different feeling working on back of an event rather than being in the event.

These are some memories I captured on my phone:

Collage during the event

Central stage of the event

Yummy food from VCC

Workplace in back of the event stage

This is where we slept in collage

All the issued ID cards