Aura – A Stage Where Intellectuals Across Genres Come Together

How it takes an engineer, an architect, an interior designer, a graphic artist, a brand strategist, a wordsmith and loads of charm and persuasion to pull off a successful event.

So what’s common between a 100-piece orchestra, a score sheet and event management?

To most, the answer might be “Well, it takes an event manager to get 100 instruments onstage and ensure that sound, light and seating are efficiently managed, so that the renowned conductor doesn’t throw his baton at you in a prima-donna-type fit!”

To the enlightened communications department of a corporation, the event management firm is his soul partner when it comes to pulling off a successful conference. The firm literally has to have the score pulsing in their veins to help the client deliver – hence the comparison to the 100-piece orchestra.

An assembly of specialists

Let’s say the brand strategy is the score sheet – the raison d’être if you will, of the entire event. It dictates every single detail – right from the choice of instruments to whether you need wind, brass and so on – right down to the number of musicians.

The different sections in the orchestra are the various disciplines that harmoniously and indistinguishably meld to create one amazing sound. Just as the education that qualifies a pianist for the role is vastly different from the skills and techniques of a violinist or a percussionist, likewise every event has, hidden in its success, the contribution of various seemingly unrelated disciplines, all strung together on one common thread – creativity.

It all begins with an idea

Ideators and wordsmiths with a background in Advertising and Design kick-start the process to create a concept that ties up with the brand’s communication purpose. Art school graduates who are also quasi architects and interior designers carry the idea forward. Of course, you have many fly-by-night shops that scour the internet for words and pictures and cobble together a working duplicate, but as Anand Mahindra expressively put it, you don’t need jhugaad, you need jhakaas! This is what gives the brand the differentiating edge.

Plans, presentations and poise

Putting together the event requires creativity again, but this time from the management school cadre. Market research, planning, client co-ordination, feasibility studies, activity ideas to take the brand communication down to a tactile, interactive level – yes these are the people who make things happen.

Micro-management Mastery

And of course, the critical production team – the nuts and bolts guys– the specialists who need to know their line arrays from their splitters and switchers, the boys out there on the battlefront, who plumb the depths of their creative capabilities to tread the fine line between an epic success and epic failure – these are the Jacks of all Trades and Masters of All! They are responsible for the output of the countless carpenters, painters, electricians, sound and light engineers, artistes – one tiny slip can bring the whole house down.

So there you have it – as Siddharth Ganneriwala likes to point out, “Any conductor can read a sheet of music but it takes insight to connect with the composer, to bring out the soul of the composition.” With two decades of event management experience behind him we guess he’s right about the orchestra analogy whenever he talks about event management!