Running successfully all over Surat.

A report on the first screening of 10plus3i's documentary 'de Young Basanti' during Kshithij at SCET,Surat on March 9,2006.










‘de Young Basanti’ - anyone hearing this can make out it has got something to do with the latest Rakyesh Mehra - Aamir Khan movie. Yes that is how we have named our first documentary.

A video footage of more than 2hrs, after putting in more than 2 sleepless nights on editing (hats off to Nikhil) had yielded a 25 minute proper documentary. Now the task on hand was to get proper publicity for out product. This particular blog actually is the report on our first step in this direction.

9th of march was the date, an ‘event’ful day for Surat, two main engineering colleges of the city are buzzing with the fests going on in each of them. KHSITIJ the techfest of SCET and our very own SPARSH the culfest of SVNIT. There couldn’t have been any better time than that day to conduct the first screening of ‘de young basanti’. We remain indebted to PT-Professional Tutorials for arranging a time slot during KSHITIJ for the screening. The time table for the day wasn’t any relaxing for the people in 10+3i either. Me and Jayanth were involved in one or the other Sparsh work all through the day and Nikhil had to conduct a quiz at 4:30, while the screening was supposed to be at 6pm. Then somehow we managed to wrap everything up and reach the venue just before 6, while two of our juniors,Pranav and Anand made sure everything was in place there before the start.Real sweet juniors they are!. But then at 6 it wasn’t dark enough to screen anything with a LCD projector in an open air theatre, so we waited for half an hour at the end of which everything was perfect, just beginning to dark, a nice cloudy sky, and more than 200 people seated in that place waiting for us to start the proceedings.

Here's the trailer of the documentary -



Nikhil, the senior most of us all gave just a brief on what can the audience expect from the documentary to be followed and we started off. The sound system though wasn’t great but still it was just fine enough for the A.R.Rahman’s beats in the backdrop to keep people interested in the beginning atleast. Documentary was all about the views and opinions of Indian youth or say Surat youth or to be more precise our college youth about the movie and the Indian society shown in it. There were around 15 people who spoke in the video out of which some 6 were girls and rest guys. Can’t really say if the audience there listened to what was coming out of the speakers but yes they liked our college girls for sure. So hootings began, it started off with ‘ooh-aaah’s for girls and ended with ‘1 2 3 4 band karo yeh atyachar’ when guys were on the screen.



Actually ‘de young basanti’ was to be followed with the screening of its parent movie ‘Rang de Basanti’ on that very same screen. So the anxiety of the audience there seemed a bit justified. Still our juniors present there were very upset with lukewarm response we got there. But then being first timers in the field and that too making a documentary on social themes we can’t expect a star like acceptance anywhere. Though that was the funda we gave our juniors to keep them grounded, in some corner of our minds too the question ‘didn’t we deserve something better than this?’ was making rounds. We had different funda to get ourselves going also, ‘only people who are hooted at have the rights to hoot at others’. With the singing night of SPARSH already on by the time we got back, we had our chance of hooting now and believe me that relieves you of all the frustration inside you better than any marijuana or vodka.