Way back in August 2009, when Nikhil spoke to me about TED’s new program of local, self-organized events, both of us were enthused about using this platform not just for organizing our own TED event, but more for playing idea evangelists on a student campus.

As a quick introduction, both of us are undergraduates at BITS, Pilani, just made it to our 20s and deeply involved with the Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, a student group committed to creating leaders through entrepreneurial thinking. Nikhil has taken active interest in design, more specifically product design and I have taken active interest in talking and discussions over coffee. Nikhil wanted to use this experience as an exercise in building a creative framework around a product, that is the TEDxPilani event, and I wanted to bring some great minds from all over India to a platform where they could inspire and inform the youth.

So it started with us, having fallen in love with the idea of TED events as a good enough reason for amazing people to gather and a great platform to execute design ideas to better the conference experience. What unfolded over the next few months was a phenomenal journey. Our victory was not just on 13^th March when the auditorium filled up with over 1200 students but when over 4000 students on campus started talking about TED Talks and ‘ideas worth spreading’ after the event.

Our main challenge in gathering interest about TEDxPilani on campus was about creating awareness about TED before we introduced our TEDx event. Hence the team tried out novel ways of reaching out to the campus folk with selected TED Talks downloaded from TED.com.

We had small closed-sessions on Sundays where we screened a selected TED Talk and then had discussions about it, what we called as “Something Sunday”. Also, one of us downloaded select TED.com talks and shared them over the local lan, under the nickname: TED. All these initiatives coupled with word-of-mouth campaigning about TED, months before we introduced TEDx worked really well. At one time, we had an enormous number of users downloading the newly uploaded TED Talks from the ‘TED’ on lan.  Sometimes so enormous that ‘TED’ had to shut down other applications just to avail of more slots and prevent his computer from crashing.

As the event closed in, the team introduced the concept of TEDx to the crowd through teasers, posters, etc. At this stage, we had got the attention and interest of the campus and the team in parallel was ready with an awesome list of speakers. But a very important void that defines the purpose of having a TEDx event was to be filled. The team had to be sure that, through this TEDxPilani platform, local ideas could be brought to the world. Here, ‘local’ meant ideas from a bubbling student campus. Hence we introduced the TEDxPilani fellowship programme where a very small group of students could share their own ideas, stories or innovations through the TEDx channel through short 4 min talks at TEDxPilani. Most surprisingly, this programme filled yet another void in the event, that was the ‘entertainment’ part. With Aditya Raghuvanshi’s novel ways of playing the Tabla (a classical Indian percussion instrument) and Soumit Saha’s passion for Rural Photography, there was a completely different perspective added to the whole event.

In the final few days before the event, the whole team got infused with Shruti’s infectious enthusiasm about a typical rural Indian stage setup. So we gathered a lot of things typically rural like the hukka (smoke-pot), the char pai (traditional bed), lots of sarees for the draping on stage and thick hand-made carpets for the floor. The stage was set, literally and metaphorically and the show began at 10:30 AM IST on 13^th March. The first session was outrageously good and appreciated by one and all. Pratham hosted the show with a friendly zest and had the Q&A with the speakers after their talks, sitting on the char pai in a highly romanticized way.

What transpired out of this whole experience was that now the entire campus started watching more of the TED Talks and shared their thoughts and views over what they watched. ‘TED’ on the lan hub was loaded with close to 8 GB of downloads per minute just a day after the event. The speakers were so fascinated with the energy of the student group that they spontaneously made something like a mini bar-camp just after the event, the same evening where they sat up in the lawns chatting with a smaller number of students and sparked great discussions.

Today as I look at the revolution that the concept of TEDx has created in student campuses across India, I believe that us undergraduates, for whom, the only real responsibility as of today is to learn, are a major audience for the TED Talks. TEDxBITSGoa, TEDxIITRoorkee and so many other TEDx events cropping up across the country which are completely student run affairs simply bring home the point that the real idea evangelism will take birth on undergraduate campuses.

This is Aniket, signing off with a big smile and hug to all those who played their little part in making TEDxPilani a grand success.

psst.. in case you missed our event live/webcast our videos will be up by 26th March. :)