Page - 1

All through my life, I had held various positions of responsibility. School head-boy, house-captain, class-monitor, general-secretary... but all of them were linked through one common thread - they were all selected positions, not elected. I had never ever contested in an election.
And hence, when the time came for the election of the Students Affairs Council (SAC) Secretaries at IIM-A, my eyes lit up. I knew here is another chance for me to do something which I had never done before; IIM-A is going to give me another first in my life!

The SAC consists of 8 secretaries representing diverse spheres of activities, namely Recruitment, Cultural, Sports, Acads, Media, IT, Mess and the Gen Secy himself. Once I made up my mind to stand for the elections, the next decision was not very tough. There was no doubt in my mind that I will contest for the post of Sports Secy. Sports is a field about which I have always been very passionate. And I had strong opinions about how the sports infrastructure and opportunities at the institute could be made better. After the Sangharsh victory, I knew that there is no dearth of sporting talent at IIM-A. And despite the huge academic load, people do take out time to indulge in their favourite sports. All this was motivation enough for me to apply for this post.

Application submitted, the real test then began. I can say with confidence that the next few days were the most hectic and tough days for me in the third term, except for the time I spent working for Chaos. And since there was not much gap between Chaos and the elections, I was on my toes for almost the entire first month of the third term. And all this does not include the long hours that needed to be put in for academics, which was in some ways 'first term revisited'. Anyways, I will come to that in my next post.

So why was this period crazily hectic? Ok, so here it goes! After filing our candidature, the next step was to come up with an election manifesto that needed to be uploaded by a certain deadline to our central server. I had to spend considerable time on preparing the same since each and every point written there would later on be scrutinized by everyone. Once this was done, the next step was campaigning - the most hectic period. I had prepared a 10 minute pitch highlighting the central areas of action that I would act upon, if selected. Campaigning did not mean the 'Vote for Vinz' slogans! Neither did it mean explaining to people why you are the best candidate for the post. All it meant was to put forth your agenda of what you intend to do for the students and the institute, if selected.

Next

* Contributed by -
Vinamra Srivastava (Campus Associate),
PGP - 2,
Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.