Milaap is one of the most recent events wherein almost all of us actively participated. Being a person in the thick of action I had the pleasure to closely observe the people and processes involved right from the planning to the implementation stages.
The success of Milaap was the result of a collective effort by the participants, faculty, alumni and the IRMA community at large. Eventhough it is termed as a completely student run initiative it required (and fortunately had) lot of institutional support. Participants through their months long planning and involvement, faculty with their timely guidance, alumni through their enthusiastic participation joined hands for the success of an uncertain outcome – Milaap’09. It wouldn’t have been possible to organise such an event without the help of ETDC and MESS. Hence it was collective action in every sense.
One interesting thing which was noted during the entire process was the way we used power at our disposal. Various teams were formed to perform different tasks. Roles and responsibilities were clearly (?) identified. May be because there was too much clarity about our job, we used our power quite effectively. It was quite similar to the ‘weapons of the weak’ (though I don’t mean to call anyone amongst us as weak) mentioned in one of the articles. Most of the times the poor victim of this power game was the Milaap coordinator who was literally squeezed between various committees left with not too many options on many occasions. In that sense the person who was supposed to be at the helm turned out to be the least powerful among all.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Milaap – a cac perspective
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4 comments:
Could you please elaborate as to how weapons of the weak is applied in this case? From your example i am unable to form a link between what you have written and weapons of the weak.
The example given in the TAU differs from what you have written here.
I do not think the power concept can be used here. this is because as students we knew that no body could force us to do any work for milaap. power concept really comes in when organisers can force their subordinates or peers to cooperate in a collective action with incentives or punishments. This controlling ability was absent as Milaap coordinator was just another student like any one of us.
Thanks
here ,it will be injustice to correlate the content of blog with the weapons of the weak because the coordinator was not a victim in true sense because we can very well see from the perspective that in Milaap event ,as such noone was leader and as far as power is concerned the coordinator was not the one who had all the powers . rather, it was the entire team of Milaap who was free to take decisions with consensus of rest of the members. so milaap in context to Weapons of the Weak is fallacy
In my view, there was wepon of weak. as we students of IRMA cannot take help from outside industry without permission of IRMA administration...that is height of bearuccracy.....
all we know our, we collected Rs.1000 for Anand Run...that was a good collective action...but, in that also we are not successful only 70% come under this collection.....rest used weapon of weak
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