Blood donation drive as part of IIT-Bs cultural festival……Upneet Pansare
Mood Indigo team will also stage motivational street plays
For the first time in the history of Mood I, IIT-B is organising a blood donation drive as part of Mood I celebrations.
The students of IIT kick started the blood donation drive at the IIT-B campus on Thursday. Touted as the largest college cultural festival in Asia with a budget that is expected to touch 1 crore this year, Mood I will be held from December 20-23.
The drive called Khoon Chala (a song from the popular Bollywood film Rang De Basanti) will encourage not just the 25,000 strong IIT-B community on the campus to donate blood but will also reach out to more than 60, 000 students from 500 colleges who are expected at the IIT campus during the four day Mood I festival in December.
The campaign will also be taken to 18 colleges in the city.
The drive will be conducted in three phases. In the first phase, the campaign will target around 5000 IITians across all the 13 hostels on campus. In the second phase, it will be conducted in 18 colleges and shopping malls. The third phase will comprise a blood donation and thalassemia detection camp during Mood I. The Mood I team will also stage motivational street plays to sensitize people towards blood donation.
The Mood I team has also produced a short film on the blood donation drive.
Ishank Gupta, core group member, media and PR, Mood I says, When the need arises you have to run from pillar-to-post because there are more blood seekers than donors. For this reason, we at Mood Indigo aim at inviting eligible people to come forward for this noble cause. If we can motivate such a large number of students to participate in Mood I, we can influence them to participate in this drive too.
Organising such a large-scale campaign is an onerous task in itself. As Ishank puts it, We (students) had to take permissions from several authorities. We had to manage everything on our own. But inthe end we were able to rope in several blood banks and colleges from across the city.
Apart from the usual host of events including dance, dramatics, speaking, literary arts, fine arts, music, workshops, exhibitions,interactive sessions and prom nights, Mood I will feature performances by Limca book of records holders, a Poland based band that uses a dining table embedded with musical instruments to create music, an art street, on the lines of the Kala Ghoda Festival, a vintage car exhibition, fencing and archery games, ice wall climbing, wind tunnel among others.