It was Sunday 2nd October when I had called in all the Student Champs for an Emergency meeting.
Being the only Student Ambassador in Chennai, I decided that we all do some thing big.
I had choose a nice place where we guys could meet over lunch. About 8 champs turned up for the meeting.

Once I told the guys about the plan I had, all of them, were really enthusiactic about it and really wanted to chip in with the preparation of the event.
I was glad that there was support for this and we set out with the arrangements.

Our discussion kept dragging for more than 1.5 hours and had completly forgotten about Lunch. The waiter then came and reminded us that we will have to order some thing or leave the palce.
Once the Food was ordered it was back to planning.We split ourselves into 4 teams, 1 for Hall Management with Aswin in charge another for Registration , a third for Finance Management with Bhasker incharge and a third for Advertising and Marketing with Sumudu.

We finalized the date as 9th October 2005. That was toooo close. I mean we just had hardly 6 days to prepare for the whole show right from Scratch.

Everyone set out to work immediately, though being a Sunday a few of the guys went out to look for the venue and finally the next day we zeroed on to Hotel Shan Royal @ Koyembedu.Nice place, but it involved a lot of bargarning and stuff and we finally made a deal for 150Rs($3.4) per head.

In the mean time I was running around for speakers, Kevin had confirmed that he will be there, but the others.........
I tried calling in all the DEs(Developer Evangelists)Jani, Gaurav, Deepak, Vineeth e.t.c, but all of them were busy, they were infact scheduled to leave for Srilanka for TechEd 2005, so those guys were not able to malke it. I even tried the other ADEs from east(Pratiba) and west(Tejas), but even they were tight with other stuff on hands.
Things were starting to get a bit desparate over hereCoz I really wanted this event to be a huge hit.

The Sumudu and Hebron were in full swings, going places, getting things done like, banners, posters sponsor hunting and stuff like that. Meanwhile Bhasker was spamming all the top companies in Chennai asking them to support us in this event.He fianlly managed to get a few companies, but no Financial Help.
Everyday the 3 of us i.e Myself, Sumudu and Hebron used to meet with each other, working out the stuff and having a quick check on the Status of all thats been done.Since it was a UG kind of event Microsoft was ready to sponsor only about 15,000/-($340) and the rest we decided to collect from the participants, coz the total estimate was about 40,000/-($900).

I could see all the other arrangements comming along fine, but still no speakers, So it was decided that Kevin and I were going to be the only speakers for the day and that we would have to do 2 sessions each.It was also decided that we have a quiz competition at the end so that we could wile away some time ;-).

Just the day before the event I was able to contact Anand, he is the .NET lead in Polaris and was just back from the MVP Summit in the US. He readily agreed to deliver a session, ....man that just relieved some pressure off of us.

We had a Student Champ meeting at the Microsoft office in the evening just to have a last minute discussion and assignment of roles for the day. We went back home, that night hoping that tomorrow everything will go right, coz most of us had really worked hard on this and were sure that the event would be a grand success.