Sapney Aur Sitarey-Story behind 'the story'

“ Labon se chum kar Aankhon se Patti Khol Deti Hai,
Muhabbat karte karte zindagi Sach bol deti hai” - (Author not known to me..)

Sapaney Aur Sitarey, was a story of seven true dreamers, those who did not only dreamt but achieved it also, of course not in the most preferable way but surely in the most memorable way.

Well “Sapney Aur Sitarey” in the most elementary form is a Hindi Story, published in SVITS college magazine Horizon’s 3rd edition which got published in May 2003 (Exactly 6 years back). The Scan copy of the story is attached here, however there is a whole interesting story behind this story…

Horizon project was headed by “Aaquil Sir” (Mr. Aaquil Bunglowala). He was the chief editor (or you may call him ‘Editor in chief’ -as Saurabh Bararia used to say). The editorial board was divided into two parts, English & Hindi. The English team was led by “Saurabh Bararia” and the Hindi team by me.

(Horizon -03 is an important chapter of my college life and I think of writing a whole series of that, step by step in following posts..pls mail your suggestions)

The editorial team was given a very interesting & challenging assignment by Aaquil Sir. Both teams (English & Hindi) had to come up with a story (not an article or essay), which is written by all its members. The thumb rules were:

1. Each part of the story should come by a different member.
2. Still there should not be any disproportion in terms of continuity or genre.
3. It should come out as a masterpiece of team work, reflecting cumulative effort of everyone’s talent.

The assignment was tough and the most difficult part was point 2, as mentioned above.
Apart from having English & Hindi Classification we had three more members who were the part of “creative team” Savita Charhate, Ketaki Naik and Aishvarya Vaid (Aishvarya is Male … its just a clarification.. No pun intended). While Savita & Ketaki did their contribution in Saurabh’s team, Aishvarya joined my team for this assignment.

Team English has got a nice plot of ‘Camp fire’; in which all of them are sitting for a camp fire and each one of them sharing an experience, one by one. In a simple and effective way they completed this assignment. (I am sure Ram gopal verma has got a copy of Horizon -03, as on the same plot he came up with “Darna Mana Hai..”)

My team had to come up with the story in Hindi, and each and every one of us did not have equal hold on Hindi Literature writing (Infect all my team mates were chosen because of there Positive attitude and the zeal to do some thing exceptional – the details of team recruitment, selection and why Horizon-3 was an exceptional task will be published soon in another post..)

My team was

Hilsa Unni (the nightingale of SVITS) (final year –IT, the then)-She was a member as a representative of IT branch in the steering committee, very few people know that she writes good Hindi poetry, she was better known for her great singing skills.

Neerav Varshney (3rd year IT, the then) – A man with great interest towards every thing constructive, literature was surely one of them. Has written some good piece of literature for Horizon 2 & 3. Always ready for any task any time.

Runjhun Pacholi (3rd Year IT the then) – She has a great sense of Music & literature (Hindi as well as English), A Potential Compere and Orator at that time (at least I believed firmly that she can make a very good anchor with her clear pronunciations, good command over both languages and presentable persona) She was almost a student of mine (The first student) for oration skills and, yes she made me feel proud when she conducted few of the programs pretty well.

Animesh Singh (2nd Year Elex the then)- A talented chap, with lots of guts. We noticed his talent during teacher’s day celebration, where he has conducted few programs on his own.

Aishvarya Vaid (2nd year IT the then)- I am sure he must be the winner of all his Arts and Crafts classes. I believe he can create any thing out of papers. He was on the job to choose the suitable clip arts for each article and was also coordinating with Printing press with Ankit.

Ankit Bhardwaj (2nd year Elex the then)- Ankit was chosen for English team but an interesting incident brought him in my team. Ankit is very intelligent, always ready with lots of out of the box ideas, very energetic and he always gives me the feel of a ‘Rebel’. You can expect him to come up with some out of the world solution every time.

I wished to have Bhuvan Gupta (3rd Year computers the then) in my team too (he was anyways with me always) but during the same period he was busy in the biggest project of those times, infect that event is still unparalleled-The Ankit Fadia Show... (Another story for my post...)

And, as first year students were barred to join Magazine committee I could not take Ankira In my team. Though she and some other first year students have helped us a lot in collecting Articles for the “Horizon”.

Well so that was the team; now let’s talk about the task…

Hilsa was busy in the preparation of Mukesh Nite (.. of course she does not sing Mukesh’s songs but she used to take part for the duets). Animesh was perhaps busy in some competitive preparation, Aishvarya and Ankit had a challenge of ‘writing down’ in Hindi. So in this way the purpose was getting defeated but we decided to complete the task in a different manner. After all, the task was a ‘team building exercise’ so we kept that purpose alive and came out with following solution.

1. We decided that we will write a story having seven key characters (a Multi starrer flick).
2. Each one of us will define and design one character.
3. We will brain storm together for a plot which can accommodate all the 7 characters.
4. Every one will help for one liners and dialogues in the story.
5. These inputs will be penned down by key writers – Me, Runjhun or Neerav.

So all set and done, we all gathered at my room for brainstorming. Ankit has one story idea about a young person who is dying of cancer and there are few characters around him whom he bring together and finally dies.

We did not buy that idea as it was looking too ‘bollywoodish’. But I am sure, later on he sold it to ‘Karan Johar’, who made ‘kal ho naa ho’ on the same plot, just one year down the line.

We finally took inspiration from one sad incident that happened those days. It was “The Columbia spacecraft Crash” in which 7 crew members died including an Indian astronaut –Kalpana Chawla. Our story was a tribute to the lady and moreover a salute to the ‘power of dreams’. She came from Haryana state where population of girl child and their % of education are still among the weakest in India, its only her deams & dare which made her a star- a true universal star.

So plot was finalized as the story of 7 astronauts who went on a mission but could not come back alive. We all have decided to be one of the characters in this story and each one has decided to design his/her chosen character.

The fact which makes this story very close to our heart is that character’s designed by us has quite a bit similarity with each one of us. Each character has some personality traits of its creator and the chemistry between the characters was also similar to the real one. Later on when story was published people could actually identify us in those characters. However we kept this background story, grounded and did not promoted the story that ways, but close friends knew this secret.

I wrote and played Capt. Siddarth, Hilsa was Kavita Rao, Neerav played Rahul Sharma, Runjhun was Disha Dixit, Animesh singh was Animesh Bajaj, Aishvarya was Gyan chand Bali and Akit was Abhimanyu singh.

I still remember, the fate of those 7 astronauts in the end of the story made all of us feel very very emotional, the moment we completed it, we all had a heavy heart.

There were some shortcomings in the story (from literary point of view)

1. It had a hurried storyline- as we all were editors and were well aware of the importance of keeping pages of magazine limited to 100 and the editing bug has made us to keep the narrations quite brief.
2. We could have made it more interesting and engaging by adding more detailed scenes.
But still this story is close to our heart.

Last and most important thing was the title. The story says all those 7 heroes have died for a Nobel cause (they preferred to send the records and reports in the emergency space craft, instead of saving their own life). All of them had a dream to do some thing big in their life though they could not realise their dreams in the expected way but they all have felt a sense of achievement before the end. Those seven dreams became the seven stars in the sky…Leading to the the title… “Sapaney Aur Sitarey”

Following 3 pages are scan copy of the story from Horizon 03, Neerav Thanks once again for the copies dear…

Luv...

VT