My first rendezvous with Knowledge Factory

This year, on the 9th of January, the fourth edition of Knowledge Factory (KF) was held at St. Agnes college, Mangalore. Knowledge Factory is a daylong event with a series of motivational and inspirational speakers from different fields like sports, music, theatre, healthcare and more. It is truly a festival of knowledge, insights and trivia. 

St. Agnes – a catholic institution which provides higher education for women, was the chosen venue for the fourth edition, and what a fabulous venue it was! This January, the college completed 100 years and the first event they hosted was #KF2020. The campus was huge and beautiful, and it was an honour for us to host the first event of the year at their newly built auditorium. 

I got the opportunity to be a part of this magnificent event and work towards the success of it. Three of my colleagues and me  flew from Delhi to Mangalore, a day prior to the event. There was a dinner organised for all the speakers, college faculty members and organisers on the same night. The dinner was an informal setting and really helped us to connect with each other and share our thoughts. My role during the event was to interview all the speakers, volunteers and faculty members. The same was communicated to all the speakers during dinner and everyone welcomed the interaction. Post dinner, we had our team meeting to discuss schedule for event day. 

On the day of the event, our team reached the venue by 7 am and started the pre-event tasks such as, setting up the stage, the console, the sound system etc. Soon the registered participants started pouring in and with a turnout of over 1200, we knew it was going to be a great day! The event began band on time with the welcome speech by the Principal of the college and Mr. N Madhavan (Co-founder, Knowledge Factory), who also addressed the audience with the short introduction about KF. 

The first speaker of the event was Heena Sidhu, the first Indian shooter to be World No. 1, along with Meena Vaidyanathan (Co-founder, Knowledge Factory), as a Moderator. She gave powerful and encouraging answers with the moto that one should always follow his/her dreams. I heard part of the talk and soon rushed to coordinate with the videographer and make sure the set up for her interview was done before she arrived. Our plan was to shoot all interview videos at different locations of the campus.

Although I could not attend any full sessions, I tried my best to listen to every speaker at least for some time to understand the gist of their thought. This also helped me in the individual interviews later. During lunch break, we shot three video bytes of theatre actor – Prakash Belawadi, renowned journalist – Manasi Paresh Kumar and co-founder/CEO of Arboreal – Swati Pandey. All of them waited patiently and showed tremendous support. Their humility was a big help to me as it my first time around with such big names and I was tensed to the core.

The post lunch sessions started off with the international comedian Papa CJ. He gave the audience an experience of “happiness yoga” and also shook a leg with the Principal of the college. The next session was a fireside chat between ex-CEO of Zee Entertainment – Sunil Buch and Co-Founder of Better India – Anuradha Kedia, which I kind of missed since I was working parallelly. With the help of one student volunteer and the videographer, I was to interview every speaker at different locations. When I came back the last session was underway, by Mr. Velumani, Founder of Thyrocare Technologies. It was a great session; he shared his life’s story in a humorous way.  

There were a lot of learnings from the event at both, personal and professional levels, but the one I value the most was ‘less is more’ i.e. if you ask for less, you will always get more. I also learned several aspects of event management, planning and guest relations. I feel honoured to have been a part of KF and am already looking forward to the next edition!

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Ameeta Vadhera

Ameeta Vadhera is an HR specialist with a Masters degree from Amity University. She started her career as an HR Executive in a medical products company and later joined PricewaterhouseCoopers, to work with the Partner Affairs team, handling end to end HR activities of Partners and Executive Directors. Born and brought up in Delhi, she currently resides in Gurgaon, where she works as a Knowledge Manager at Promise Foundation.