This year I have been part of two projects in India. Having been recently appointed as Technical Director of the Forever Living Products Global Rally, we ventured to India for the Forever Global rally 2024. Delhi to be precise, at the Indira Ghandi Stadium.
The stadium is the national centre for badminton of India and has a complete living and training complex for young players to learn badminton and compete at a professional level. What it most certainly is not, at the first impression, is a venue for an event of the size and detail that we had envisaged.
With respect to the people who run the place it is sadly not funded very well to keep it up to the standards that it obviously achieved for its Commonwealth Games central role as the centre for badminton.
It is rather worse for wear to be very kind, but the very helpful venue team on site made the best of efforts to support our requests within the confines of government building bureaucracy and eventually we settled on what we knew we could fix and what we could not.
So, with this in mind we embarked on a journey over 6 months to create a complex show, to keep it within budget and get the project delivered to the standards our client expects in an environment that was very challenging and surprising.
It is very easy when you travel the world and work in many different countries to be disparaging of everything in that country. We all do it, I live in Italy, and I tell people in their droves who dream of retirement to an Italian hillside town not to do it, as the practice mostly certainly does not live up to the reality!! In this case, the venue was not helping Delhi’s’ case as a premium event and meeting place post hosting the G20 in 2022.
The venue restrictions we were told of include, no rigging despite there more steel in the roof than in Sydney harbour bridge, no fireworks cold or hot, no plant inside, we had to protect the floor with plywood to spread the weight on the sprung wooden floor that they couldn’t and wouldn’t give us a weight loading on and numerous backstage restrictions as to which of the 100 plus rooms we couldn’t use.
The venue is an arena on two tiers with undetermined capacity. The website describes it as 15000 pax but that does not include the concrete bleachers that sit around another 3000 pax in a third tier. Obtaining a drawing was worse than pulling teeth until we eventually sent in someone to scan the space and determine its capacity and actual size. We were given a 2010 drawing which was the ground plan of the 2010 commonwealth games with all the VIP detail and kit on it. So, between the two drawings, we were able to create a master plan after I deleted walls and added doors to their actual position.
As we had no overhead rigging, we created a ground support and had extra truss on the bleachers to give us some front and audience lighting. The ground support also had LED acting as screens and proscenium archway detail along with moving central legs over the central stage. Add a myriad of lights, speakers, very dodgy special effects truss, over 14 legs putting down over 50 ton of down force onto a floor we had no weight loading for. Various Indian engineer and Hod chats combined with schoolboy maths, I managed to work out that a 54 mm ply floor would spread the weight to give us a distribution that would bring the spread down to allowable limits that would allow 6 people to stand in one square metre, roughly 5kn psqm. A risky strategy absolutely but underwritten by the client and having put 6 people in numerous plotted spots it was reasonable to assess this was a realistic weight allowance. As long as you didn’t look under the sprung floor and look at the supporting steel which looked in worst nick due to the constant damp than steel on the Titanic videos, it was a reasonable assessment to make but one with a slight niggle that only released when it was taken down!
The venue infrastructure was very poor, lighting and ceilings and especially the toilets were in woeful condition. A large team of repair warriors were endeavouring to stem the tide of decay but actually standing in a room when some ceiling pieces fell down didn’t give me much confidence. It appears that repairs were done on an event by event ad hoc basis, which rooms were being used determined which should be done up. As were using all the venue I inspected all 77 possible toilets and only one was fit for us in the VIP dressing room. We had 15000 people coming and we would need all of these. Once on the ground in April we had a team dedicated to cleaning up what could be used safely and I personally inspected them all. For the opening day of the event with a massive technical team looking after the show I was responsible for everything else venue and guest wise.
I guess it was maybe 20 mins after the gates to the arena space had been opened and a call came on the radio that the guest toilets were not working. I checked the crew ones as they were nearest, and they absolutely were not working. I am 57 fairly well travelled and I have never seen solids coming out of a urinal and onto the floor like an overflowing slush puppy machine except in Caramel! Put this across a venue with guests arriving I had further calls that the water was not on in the guests side of the venue. Ǫueues started forming and people in search of a working loo started arriving backstage and in office areas and the admin block of the stadium. Security was not stopping people coming in as the majority were foreigners and they didn’t want to get into trouble, so we had a free for all. Coordinating the fixing and the people management was our local fixer who expertly corralled people back to where they should be whilst the issue was being sorted. The issue was that the venue in their wisdom decided not to put the water pumps on until the show time and they take a couple of hours to build up enough pressure. This process was only halfway through when the guests were arriving so took some time to resolve. The poo coming out of the urinal was a mystery and to be honest although myself and Celia Waite the proj co on the job will never be able to unsee that, we never got a reasonable explanation. It could be why, however, I was diagnosed with dysentery though two days later whilst trying to board a flight.
On the ground working can be difficult if you try and operate on your own. We used a selection of agents in Delhi with varying stages of success. MCI was the client’s main choice for hotel bookings and tour organising. I didn’t use them for the tech side, but they are undoubtedly connected in the city. They are a friendly bunch and have a great selection of managers on site who guided the events in the hotel side of the event and delivered high quality tech and scenic. For the arena I used VR events who are the preferred supplier for Forever living whilst at the IGS. Their knowledge and ability to mobilise people and kit on last minute request was incredible and all done with courtesy and calm. The team headed up by Vishal Sharma and the owner Deepak Saini were a joy to have on site and I would recommend them in Delhi. We also used Festiva Exhibition and Events, the team headed up by Bharat Sharma and Kshitiz Bhatnagar who also ran an excellent team of HOD’S. Festiva seem to have the whole deal, easy going people with high skill levels, their communication is excellent with emails and WhatsApp replies which is critical when you are driving an event forward at pace across 4 time zones.
Why use agencies? Well, it is pretty impossible to meet a supplier without them and they will deal with all the licenses and tax that is deeply unfathomable. There are massive fee differences, and they are negotiable but be very clear as to what the fees apply to and what they don’t. There is also the detail of being a foreigner, globally the price will rise with foreign money
involved. It does here in Italy if I contact a new supplier, so I get one of my contacts to do it for me to keep the price sensible.
In general, in Delhi, you can find amazing exhibition, set and tech suppliers who deliver unconventionally overnight mostly due to Delhi’s trucking laws and that can take some getting used to schedule wise. The only thing we needed to outsource was our comms system from PRG in Dubai as there wasn’t the availability of the required system or volume in India.
It is a great vibrant city to work in, but a bugger to get around so allowing hours for a few miles is not an overestimate for scheduling. We had a great journey, I learnt a lot about the job of TD for a large stadium event and came back with many things, sadly dysentery being one of them, but that’s another story!!
I also did a very different corporate job in Bangalore in June with the assistance of Festiva who have a great supply chain there also.
If you are thinking of going there and I can be of help, please let me know.
Meanwhile I am looking at a project there next year and also in Paris and Milan at the moment from my base in Italy, so if I can be of help here at home as well, please let me know.
