Students participate at an event in Celegance 2011. Picture by Ashwinee Pati

Bhubaneswar, April 7: More than 2,500 participants turned up at Celegance, the biennial techno-cultural festival of C.V.Raman College of Engineering (CVRCE) that kicked off today on its campus. Apart from the majority of CVRCE students, others from several engineering colleges across the state are also attending the fest.

Celegance, short for “Celebration with elegance”, started with a formal inaugural session after which a series of exciting, adventurous and technically challenging activities got under way. In the Mock the Press event, the participants had to pick chits on which a celebrity’s name would be written. Acting like the celebrity, the person had to respond to a set of naughty questions from a panel of judges posing as reporters.

Other events at the three-day fest included Roadies, photo and movie making, gully cricket and cyber gaming. For Roadies, 70 participants were divided into 14 group with five members in each. They were assigned tasks such as picking out a ring from cow dung, running with tied legs, climbing a tree and so on. The group that survives in the end would be separated and pitched against each other for the ultimate Roadie title. Photo and movie making would test a person’s abilities to combine creativity, technology, humour, colour and sequence. In photo-making, the contestants were asked to click pictures of the various activities at Celegance over three days and create a collage out of it. For movie-making, they had to come up with a short film.

With the Indian Premier League beginning on Friday, a shorter version titled ‘gully cricket’ which took off at CVRCE was the major attraction of the day. In this format, there were six-member teams who played a six over innings each on a 25-yard circle.

“The techno-cultural fest aims to provide a platform to the students to exchange new technical ideas and learn innovative concepts in order to enhance their knowledge and creativity,” said Sumit Jha, a fourth year CVRCE student and one of the organisers.

There are scores of other interesting events such as face painting, war of bands, war of djs, 60 seconds to fame, ad man show, rangoli, lead India and nukkad (skits) lined up for the next two days.