Garba fest was a one-day event celebrating the festival of Navratri (which is celebrated for nine nights). This one day students and teachers from senior school came together to play Garba. It was a student-led event, which my batchmates had planned for their CAS project. I participated in the decor team as well as in the flashmob that was to be conducted on the day of the event. I wanted to be a part of it because it would give me an opportunity to work with people I know, get to learn new things, and as for the flash mob, it was an opportunity for me to do something I was once fond of (dancing).
The Learning Outcomes I achieved through this activity were LO1, LO2, LO4 and LO5.
Learning outcome 1: A strength for me during this event was my experience in organizing events through which I know that I function well in groups and can contribute good ideas. My weakness was that I always want perfection in what I do and since it is hard to achieve I usually get really frustrated about it. Looking at others and how they were calm and okay with some small mistakes made me feel a little bit better. It is important for us to know our strengths especially in events like this where you work with multiple people because everyone can then contribute to the best of their abilities and do things they are good at and can also others do things you need to work upon and learn from that.
Learning outcome 2: The greatest challenge for me was to open myself up and dance. I was not confident, and I had stage fright. I know for a fact I can dance well but I couldn’t understand what was stopping me to open up now. I had to become confident and hence I undertook this challenge. I had also joined dance classes recently where even my teachers told me I needed to be more confident in order for me to open up and dance in the best possible way. For me overcoming this challenge was important because this is not the only event that will need me to go out of my comfort zone. I thought, “In future, I will have to get over my stage fright, I will have to challenge myself so why not start now?” In the end, I didn’t perform with a 100% confidence but it was a step towards achieving the confidence that I had lost. I felt proud of myself for doing this and not backing out of the challenge. Since life is all about taking risks.
Learning outcome 4: For dance practices coming early was necessary for the dance practice, we also met outside the school for doing the decor work as we didn’t have a lot of time. Coming early was hard because we had school work and submissions which I had to stay up late to do then had to wake up early and gather energy for the practice. A lot of times I also felt like dropping out of the flashmob since I could not nail the choreography which was important for me since I have the desire to be near perfect at things I do. However, I knew that running away from the challenge won’t help me so I was committed to do what I promised myself I would.
Learning outcome 5: As I mentioned earlier working in groups is easy for me and in fact, I really like to do it, since it gives so many new ideas and perspectives. It was easy for me to work with this group of people because I already knew them and I had already worked in events like this before. We had to coordinate for the dances too, which was very important. We had some difficulty doing that since not everyone had the same pace of learning and not everyone agreed with the choreography at one go but eventually we worked it out since we had an understanding between each other. In future, we might have to do a lot of team tasks so it is important to understand the importance of it. As mentioned earlier, working in teams gave us a chance to contribute according to our strengths and learn news things from others.
Overall, this was great opportunity to learn and bond with friends. It also taught us a lot of things like to be more open minded, and being a better communicator. Personally, the experience gave me an opportunity to be courageous and perform in front of a large audience, and I don’t regret doing it. It makes me feel happy that I can challenge myself to do better and gives me hope for the future.