Spirited students conquer power cut at exhibition

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Lalit Kala Academi on Greams Road in Chennai was bubbling with art enthusiasts and students on Tuesday morning.

A podium was set up inside the art gallery and the arrangements for the inauguration of the MARG Institute of Design and Architecture Swarnabhoomi (MIDAS) exhibition were completed.

The guests, including the director of Goethe Institut, Mr Karl Pechatscheck, MARG group CMD G. R. K. Reddy and consulting editor Mr R Bhagwan Singh of Deccan Chronicle had arrived on time. But as the student organisers ushered the guests inside ‘to show off their creations’, the power went off.

Actually, the institute had scheduled the function at 11 am to avoid the scheduled one-hour power cut in the morning, so the students were caught unawares by the second disruption at that critical hour.

Frantic calls to the officials at the Electricity Board did not yield much, except a bland assurance that there was some problem with a nearby transformer and it would be set right “in 30 minutes, or so”.
The students were crestfallen.

They had beautifully arranged everything in the gallery but it was pitch dark inside. Some of them ran to a nearby shop to fetch candles and lit them in the gallery. It actually added an aesthetic feel to the art works.

And when one of the guests suggested that the inaugural function could be held outside at the parking lot of the Academi, the students quickly brought the chairs out and fixed a speaker’s podium sans mike. The natural setting under huge trees added value to the inauguration.

Among the speakers was the hugely talented young architect Kavitha Selvaraj, who sounded a bit disappointed that the power-cut deprived the students of her PowerPoint presentation.

“I could have slept early had I not sat up with my computer to prepare this PowerPoint presentation,” she told the audience but went on to enlighten the audience wondrously on the significant and successful architectural developments across the globe, across the time.

The mike and the lights switched on moments after the two-hours-plus function got over. Thank you EB.