Busy in his role as the coordinator of the Hindi Activities Society (or HAS), Raghav Leekha nevertheless agreed to a mobile interview as he hurried from the library to unknown destinations that needed him most.
HAS differs from other clubs in that its members do not specialize in a visible skill such as competitive coding or the performing arts, but it has a specific metric for recruitments nonetheless. HAS members, Raghav stated, are required to be quick-witted and persuasive—tickets to a show do not sell themselves, and it is up to members of HAS to convince the General Body Members (GBM) beyond all doubt that a comedy show is exactly what it needs to unwind in the week before the mid-semester examinations.
Live events at BITS conceal a competitive economy, and the lowest quotes on the best artists wins a club or department the right to manage concert production. Among the contenders is HAS, and for APOGEE it is prepared to lay claim over the professional show (the concert) and the comedy show, N2O. The latter has been traditionally a HAS event, and its coordinator is confident in history’s unfailing inclination to repeat itself; after all, Raghav reasoned that N2O, under HAS, has always invited massive profits and praise.
HAS, however, does not put all its eggs in the basket of professional shows; it has, besides, two events— the recurrence of the beloved event Mindkraft and its newest brainchild, BITS Got Letaunt. The former is a quizzing event intended to be more fun than taxing; one of its rounds, Raghav revealed, constitutes staring at blurred images of a movie scene, for example, and agonizing over its name.
If BITS Got Letaunt is a brainchild, then it finds its parental figures in HAS and Comedy Hub (ComHub), a BITS Pilani club with self-explanatory motives. Raghav outlined a rough division of labor between the two clubs— HAS deals with diplomatic talks with CoStAA and the Corroboration and Review Committee (CRC), while Comedy Hub handles the selection of participants. The event itself is along the lines of the show India’s Got Latent, after which it is named, and has a generous prize pool, which Raghav estimated to be Rs 20,000.
HAS’s work began long before the main technical fest; in the Food Fest, which was served as the appetizer before APOGEE, the club hosted another N2O Nite with much success; beginning with a handful of performances by ComHub, N2O had the audience in splits with its celebrity lineup, namely, Madhur Virli and Yash Rathi.
The auditorium can hold only so many people, so HAS members do not hope to sell tickets to every one of the five thousand students frequenting the mess and other pitching hotspots. Raghav admitted that rejections far outnumber sales, which only toughens every member enormously. He ended the interview with a wish to see most readers in the flesh as participants in the HAS events, which he promises will be tremendously fun.