The event organisers claim that they were ready to go on any given day but what of the booked artistes and audience?

The trick to any festival is to start small, but think big, it seems. Shiladitya Chakraborty’s YouTube-inspired (he watched a video of the Earth Hour initiative in Sydney at home one night), Batti Bandh campaign eventually encompassed all of Mumbai, but his quartet of organisers initially wanted to include only one suburb, like Bandra or Borivali. “We tried to do too much in too little time. The majority of work happened in the last month,” he says, conducting a post-mortem. “One day we were meeting with members of a housing society, the next day was a corporate and third day, a school,” he adds.

Jimmy Mistry’s Enlighten Film Society took six months to execute, from the time he and his filmmaker pal, Pranav Ashar, wondered why a film crazy public didn’t have a Kurosawa alternative to every K-Jo film that was screened. “We put a proposal on paper and showed it to Cinemax. They approved in a second,” he says. But arranging two locations (South Mumbai and the ’burbs), hiring professionals, studying how film societies work, took the 25-year-old much longer.

“You have to make a lot of noise. We arranged a press conference and invited Anurag Kashyap. My advice is that the organisers should always speak first and let the celebrity say their piece last. That way, everyone stays till the end,” laughs Mistry.

Not everyone gets as lucky with sponsors. Salsero Kaytee Namgyal’s annual Salsa India Festival has been overlooked by sponsors for the past three years for being “too niche”. “I usually end up broke by April and take a loan. The entry tickets barely cover costs for the performers we invite from across the world and the venue,” says the 29-year-old.

Yet, convinced that more Mumbaikars should be exposed to different styles of dance, instead of him sharing second-hand information motivates him enough to organise it every year.

Cyrus Dastur and Rohini Gupta bypassed both, haggling about the venue and sponsors by hosting the Shamiana Festival, on the latter’s terrace. “Large organised festivals are so corporate. If you have a soap or cosmetic sponsor, you need to have a beauty booth. We wanted a youth-based festival where we literally asked what people wanted and organised workshops accordingly,” says Anandita Ghose, one of the festival co-ordinators.