Spring Fest, known as SF (motto: True Spirit of Youth), is the annual social and cultural festival of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur held during January in the spring semester. The first edition was held in 1960. The 60th edition of Spring Fest was held from January 24 to 27, 2019.
Inception and growth
The first edition of Spring Fest was held in 1960, which makes it one of the oldest college fests in India. It was conceived as a platform for the students of IIT Kharagpur to showcase their extra academic skills. Over the years, it began to attract participants from the neighboring colleges of West Bengal. In the last decade or so, the fest grew in scale, attracting participants from all over India and as well as abroad. The 2019 edition of the fest received a footfall of over 80,000 people.
The 2021 Spring Fest was held online drawing 100k live viewers.
Activities
During the fest, students from IIT Kharagpur and from different colleges all over the country participate in a multitude of social and cultural activities. The ambit of the events encompasses various genres like Dance, Music, Dramatics, Photography, Literature, Quizzing, Food Fest and Fine Arts.
Tremendous participation and aggressive competition are seen in all the events, especially the flagship events of SF, namely Nukkad, Shuffle, Wildfire, Rangmanch, Centrifuge, and Lake Side Dreams. The preliminary rounds of Nukkad, Shuffle and Wildfire happen nationwide. Every city that Spring Fest visits to conduct prelims, the whole atmosphere turns festive and the creative lot throng to the venue to see the show of talent.
Other non-competition based events include Hard-Talk, which involves talks/conferences by eminent personalities from a variety of fields, a talk by motivational speakers and various workshops on Filmography, mocktail making, cupcake dressing etc. The number of these events is particularly large and serves to cater to the very large number of participants — both local as well as from other colleges all over the country.
The hub for major activities during the fest is called the Arena, which has the Informals and Perpz stage. The informals stage hosts various fun filled casual activities, for which the participants can win numerous prizes. The Perpz stage is an all day dance floor with a DJ, that attracts huge crowds. Apart from this the arena also has numerous food and corporate stalls.
Pro Nights
The evenings are notable for the "Pro-Nights", more commonly known as Star-Nites — the biggest events in Spring Fest which usually involve live concerts by some of the most famous musicians and bands of national and international acclaim. All the Star Nites are free to attend for any student of the institute and all registered participants. The genres of music are wide and varied and involve pop, rock and fusion bands. The venue for these events is the Tagore Open Air Theater (TOAT) and Jnan Ghosh Stadium which usually get packed to their full capacity during the Star-Nites, with crowds of up to 23,000 people. Famous Indian artists like Armaan Malik, Sachin–Jigar, Shalmali Kholgade, Farhan Akhtar, Amit Trivedi, Salim–Sulaiman, Pritam, Kailash Kher, KK, Papon, S. P. Balasubrahmanyam, Shaan, Sunidhi Chauhan, Vishal–Shekhar, Shweta Pandit, Shankar Mahadevan, Shivamani, Sukhwinder Singh and classical performers such as Pandit Debashish Bhattacharya, Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia, L. Sriram, Pandit Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, and Pandit Divyang Vakil have performed here. Bands like The Local Train, Coshish, Order of Chaos, Pentagram, Swarathma, Underground Authority, Kryptos, Parikrama, Euphoria, Indian Ocean, Strings, and Spunk have also performed.
International bands like Dead By April Breathe, the Floyd Sound, Monuments, Led Zepplica, TesseracT and The Order of Chaos have also performed on the Spring Fest stage.
Spring Fest has also hosted many EDM artists from across the world namely Nina Suerte, The Progressive Brothers, Diego Miranda, Zaeden and Zephyrtone.
Events
Spring Fest consists of more than 130 events from varied genres that provide a platform for students where they can prove their mettle and caliber.
The fest conducts its Hitch Hike - Nation Wide Prelims held in 8 cities for events like Wildfire, the national level rock band competition; SF Idol, Solo Singing competition; Shuffle, the street dance competition;Shake a Leg, Solo Dance Competition; Two for a Tango, Duo Dance competition; and Nukkad, the street play competition. Wildfire attracts registrations from multitudes of bands, and prizes in the 2019 edition were worth more than 5 lakh INR.