Imtiaz Ali with the winners of the short film competition

This is a super-cool post for me to write, because the event Birla Sun Life Presents Magnum Opus at XIC was my class assignment – I’m in the current Public Relations batch, and as part of our Event Management module, we had to plan and execute a real-life awards night event. We asked Imtiaz Ali to attend, and he very kindly agreed, making our show just that much better. Since I was there from start to finish, I’m bringing you all the on-stage and behind-the-scenes details from this event!

I was handling the publicity side of things, and let me tell you, it was really odd being on the other side of the fence. I’ve covered many events for MissMalini and entered as a journo; this was the first time I was behind the desk registering media, chasing the photographer to make sure he took the right photos, and just generally making sure the media was comfortable. A real-life event really does give you a reality check – all those fancy ideas we used to come up with for assignments? Yeah, turns out they’re not that easy when you actually have to execute them. I’ve gotten a real taste of things – from writing urgent press releases at 2am to being hung up on by a journo, it’s been a real wake-up call!

Imtiaz Ali awarding students

What did go absolutely smoothly, though, was getting Imtiaz Ali on-board. A classmate spoke to him and asked if he’d be willing to attend, and he was totally great about it from the beginning. He showed up on-time and hung around for longer than he’d initially said he’d stay for. The cutest thing was when he got up on stage after a rap performance and said good-naturedly, “Sahil, the rapper? I didn’t understand half of what you said. I think you’ll have to give me in writing… I’m from the older generation!” And even though he needed to leave after presenting awards, we asked if he’d be willing to stick around for the dance performance, and he agreed – when we apologized for keeping him back, he said, “No, it’s fun!” He did seem to be having fun – he laughed during our spoof performances, clapped during the dancing, and best of all, when we were playing a DDLJ clip, he was saying the dialogues along with the movie. 😉

Vaishali Desai awarding alumni

Model/actor Vaishali Desai also attended and looked lovely; she gave out awards and stuck around for most of the show… it was really great to have them both in the audience and appreciating what we put up! Nothing feels better than seeing what was in your head play out on stage, and on top of that having the people in the audience appreciate it – especially guests like Imtiaz Ali and Vaishali Desai.

We closed the night with a set by Pune-based Wasabi – they were fantastic, singing Dil Se, Iktara (a very talented classmate joined them for this one) and, fittingly, Saada Haq.