By Himanshu Dubey
Train no. 2449, Goa SMPRK Express, for New Delhi, is running late by one hour. The new arrival time is 2220Hrs." This announcement tried it's best to dampen our spirits while waiting for Goa SAMPRK Express at Vasai road station on 7th February, 2006 as we were going to participate in The Big Picture fest organized Amity University, Noida. But we decided to turn this time into one of the most exciting and remarkable moments of life.

The hospitality team of Amity University was waiting for us headed by Shruti and Neeraj. Being only team from Mumbai we were recognized by authorities of the University. Besides SBC, there were local teams like FDDI, Take One Institute of Mass Communication, Amity Law School and other teams from Jaipur, Jalandhar and Lucknow were also there.

The first day went off like a breeze with all the students either participating in some event or just cheering others among the audience. The first event was Cartooning with a topic "Gay rights in India" for which Eva Pandey participated in it. Media debate marked the end of the day with hot discussion took over the topic "Jack of all trade v/s Master of one art: Generalised v/s Specialized reporting" having Dhwani Karania for the motion, Krupa Vora against it and Chikita Kukreja as the mediator.

Day two was yet a new challenge for all of us, as a series of competitions were ahead, yet to be dealt with. To begin with, there was screening of documentaries at the studio of Amity University. Eight documentaries were screened including SBC's documentary on 'WATER POLLUTION'; it received quite a lot of appreciation by the audience as well by the judges.
Niharika Singh partook in the Poster Making for which she bagged the second place for SBC. It was followed by, Radio Jockeying, where Krupa Vora had to speak on "What if water turns yellow?" for a minute. The whole event was extremely fun filled and happening with peppy audiences and an equally playful crowd.

The last day, Street play was the first in the agenda, where we enacted a play called "AKSHARON KI MALA", on the education of a girl child. Akshay and Anshul did fairly well in Brand Recall and Himanshu, Adil, Sameer and Dhwani showed equally good efforts in Situational Analysis. This was the first time we saw how street plays are done in true forms and we also came to know how great photographers are there in this country in the photography exhibition where the photos taken by Krupa were also exhibited

Not only this, to give us adrenaline boost 'JAL' - rock band and Indian Idol participants performed live at the campus. Dhwani and Snehal grabbed a lot of attention with their really groovy dance (though they ended up screaming with pain in neck, later that evening!!). What else???? We also caught an eye of Sony Entertainment Television camera as their team shot us dancing and aired the same on the Indian Idol show.

We finally caught our return train on 12th February night at 09:30 from New Delhi Railway station. We sang, we laughed, we joked in the entire journey. In the end, we were satisfied as the level of exposure and experience that we earned was 'priceless'.