“My equipment had better work the first time”

February was a very busy month for Dev Mohanty. He helped organize a crafts fair at Bharat Nivas, videoed the SEAS performance in the Amphitheatre, was a volunteer Ashram coordinator for the Matrimandir team, and helped set up the live streaming of the Prime Minister’s speech and the Auroville birthday bonfire celebrations.

Many people around the world enjoyed the live streaming of the birthday bonfire. But what lay behind this and other 50th anniversary broadcasts?

Dev had the right expertise for the job. After graduating from the Ashram school, he worked overseas for some time, including a stint with MIT Labs in Boston and fiber optics corporations in the South Pacific. When he returned to Pondicherry three years ago, he became involved in helping Aurinoco Systems lay a fiber optic network in Auroville.

Early in January, Chandresh asked him if he could organize the Auroville marathon market this year. He agreed and arranged for tribal artisans to go to Auroville from different parts of India to display their products at an Arts and Crafts mela.

At the same time, Aurinoco was busy digging trenches and laying fiber to the Bharat Nivas Auditorium in preparation for telecasting the upcoming Prime Minister’s address: Auroville was allowed to stream it within the community for the many who could not attend the event. So Aurinoco and the 50th Core Group asked Dev if he’d be willing to help set up the live streaming of the visit for viewing across Auroville.

While this work was underway, Dev was also asked if he would be the point of contact for all the Ashram-related people who wished to attend the bonfire celebrations on 28th February. Hemant Shekhar, one of the new executives of Matrimandir, arranged to meet him at the Amphitheatre to tell him what it would involve.

“While we were discussing,” says Dev, “I noticed people rehearsing and was told it was for the upcoming SEAS performance. That’s when I thought that perhaps we could live stream this event to test the hardware as a dry run for the Prime Minister’s address.”

The SEAS rehearsal

Hemant and Vladimir from Matrimandir were very supportive and Chandresh and the Aurinoco team worked out the details. Within two days, all the necessary fiber connections to the Amphitheatre had been made. Dev also asked Auroville Radio if they could help with the filming because they had just acquired new cameras. However, when the SEAS organizers heard about the idea to stream the event, some of them had reservations about the quality of the audio. In the end, it was agreed that Dev and team could live stream the event but without audio.

Dev streamed it to a few knowledgeable friends and the feedback was fairly positive. “It was a great relief to have got it all working. This was a first: nobody had been allowed to stream live from the Amphitheatre before. I began feeling that we had the right gear to work in low light conditions, so at this point we began thinking we should stream the bonfire on the 28th, provided the Matrimandir executives agreed.”

The Prime Minister’s speech

The technical hardware required for the Auditorium transmission was very different from that used at the Amphitheatre and Dev needed to coordinate with Auroville Radio to work out where to place the cameras etc. But this was difficult because the Prime Minister’s security people were severely limiting access to the Bharat Nivas auditorium and campus. “And, of course, every time we came, all our equipment had to be scanned by security.”

On the morning of the Prime Minister’s speech, Dev was stopped everywhere by security, even though he had a Foundation press pass. Dev had a critical piece of equipment, a streaming media server, that security hadn’t seen before and they wouldn’t let him through with it until it was given security clearance. “Time was passing and I was freaking out as the Prime Minister was already at Matrimandir. Finally, after what must have been half an hour, they let me through.”

The radio team had not yet arrived and it was not clear if they would get through security in time, so Dev prepared to do the whole broadcast from a backup camera he’d been carrying along. “And I kept thinking to myself that we had still not done the audio test, so my equipment had better work the first time.”

At the beginning of the programme, everybody stood up for the Tamil anthem. “At that moment, the cables that had been neatly plugged in started flying in all directions. I was scrambling around on the floor reconnecting cables while everybody else was standing, and I noticed some security guys giving me some pretty weird looks.”

In the event, everything went well. Dev and his team streamed the proceedings in High Definition to around 300 people watching at various locations around Auroville.

The 50th bonfire

Now that Dev knew everything worked, his team started preparing for the morning bonfire and water ceremony. Dev decided to use more cameras for this event to cover different angles, so he reached out to Francis and Doris of Auroville Video, who were keen to be involved, along with the Auroville Radio team. Integrating the different video and audio feeds would be a challenge as time was short and they did not have the right equipment, so Dev decided to improvise using some additional wifi equipment.

However, at the dress rehearsal the previous day, the wifi didn’t work. Dev decided to go ahead anyway.

“I showed up at 2.30 on the morning of the bonfire. I hadn’t slept the night before and I was a complete wreck. Earlier in the evening, Mauna had announced the YouTube channel feed for the live streaming of the event. I could already see 100 plus people tuned in, just waiting for it to go live! It’s then that I realised the level of expectation for us to deliver was huge; there was no backing out from now.”

Dev had been testing and retesting the equipment obsessively. The equipment wasn’t ideal, but he thought it would do the job if the network held up.

However, the first thing that went wrong that morning was that the wifi wouldn’t work. This meant that Doris’s camera, which was to get close-ups near the Urn, could not be connected to the live feed. “It was a bummer.”

Worse was to follow. The team recalibrated all the audio and video devices, “but when I hit the button to go live, nothing happened! At this point, I started getting frantic phone calls, emails and Whatsapp enquiries from people wondering what was happening as we were already late going live. My heart sank; I thought it was going to be an epic failure”.

Not wanting to give up, Dev decided to create another YouTube channel, but then he learned that it takes up to 24 hours for a new channel to be approved. In desperation, he contacted a friend in the US who works at Google, and asked him to get somebody from the YouTube team to approve a new channel immediately. “Unfortunately, he was from a completely different IT project and, anyway, he couldn’t make out what I was saying as the meditation had started and I was whispering. I wrote to Mauna, who was already receiving emails from around the world, saying we were working to solve some unforeseen technical hiccups but, finally, I’m leaving it all to Her.

“Within a minute of sending that email, I get a notification from YouTube that the new channel has been approved to go live!”

Dev hit the go-live button. “Instantly, I can see 100 simultaneous viewers, 200, then 300 people watching it from all over the world. I took a deep breath to savor the moment, and to thank the myriad people who got involved along the way, without whom it simply wouldn’t have been possible.”

Dev had enabled live chat, which allowed viewers to communicate with the production team. “That was the best thing that I did because people could tell us where they wanted the cameras to be pointed – at the children’s faces when they were carrying water, or at the choir, or to catch the sunrise over the Matrimandir and Urn. We were able to fulfill these requests in real time: it was magical.”

In the end, about 1000 people watched it live. A day later, the online video had been watched over 8000 times. “We started receiving emails from all over the world about how moved people had been. Groups had hired cafes, projectors and big screens, or gathered at friend’s houses to watch the bonfire and the water ceremony, even at odd hours of the night. That’s when I realised that what had started two weeks ago as a casual conversation had ended up becoming something very special.”

Reflections

“Now, with hindsight, I feel there was a much bigger thing that made it all happen, something that was guiding us. I think it was just meant to happen in the way that it did, and we all had our roles to play in the bigger scheme of things.”

Dev would love to do it again. “This was the first time something had been streamed live from the Amphitheatre and I am a firm believer that if it is something that brings people together, we should do it every year. But it is not for me to decide.”

‘Bringing people together’ was not just a reference to connecting people outside Auroville with a profound moment in the community’s history. When Dev was an Ashram school student, Auroville was out of bounds. More recently, a small group of Aurovilians had signed a petition opposing an invitation to officials of the Sri Aurobindo Society to attend the event.

So a few days earlier, when Dev went to invite the main Ashram trustee, Manoj Das Gupta, to attend the bonfire, he was not sure how he would react. “I was pleasantly surprised that he was more than welcoming. Manoj said we do not need to live in the past. Instead, we need to make the bridge with the youngsters. Are we not all Her children, are we not all here for a reason and, after all, Auroville is the Mother’s vision. Isn’t this what we’re celebrating 50 years later?

“As I walked away, I couldn’t help but remember the students’ prayer, one that we must have repeated so many times over the years, but one that had never made more sense.

Make of us, the hero warriors we aspire to become. May we fight successfully the great battle of the future that is to be born against the past, which seeks to endure; so that the new things may manifest and we are ready to receive them.

“I guess this is why I was very happy to know that the Ashram school had sent over 150 teachers and students to attend the morning ceremony. What a wonderful start to the anniversary year!” 

The live stream footage of the bonfire and water ceremony can be seen at goo.gl/uvTBJE