There comes a moment in every volunteer’s day during Malhar—you’re running between venues, balancing three things in your hand, probably surviving on the third cup of coffee for the day, when someone points a camera at you and squeaks “SMILE.”
You laugh awkwardly.
Before you know it, your face is on the Malhar Instagram story. And by the end of the day, you’re starring in a reel you didn’t even know was being filmed!
Welcome to the world of Film & Documentation and Public Relations—the two teams making sure Malhar lives both in the moment and long after it’s over.
“Guys, one more reel.”
“Don't eat yet; we need a picture.”
“Do I look like a tripod to you?”
If you’ve spent even an hour with FnD and PR teams, I’m sure you must’ve heard these words.
Before the stage is lit, before the events begin, before the volunteers start sprinting from one LR to another, and before the crowd arrives at the college, Malhar already starts making its way onto your screens—a countdown begins on the Instagram story, a reel teases what’s to come next, and stories start introducing teams and events. Long before the fest even begins, the PR team already starts telling the story of Malhar. And during the fest? They’re everywhere. If you’ve ever refreshed the Malhar Instagram page every few minutes and seen a new story, you’ve already seen PR at work. They’re the first ones to post breaking updates when an event begins, the ones hopping between venues to capture guests and judges as they walk down the hallway, and the ones filming transitions for reels.
“Working with the team has been nothing short of a dream come true, from handpicking them from a wide pool of candidates to having the most creative, outstanding ideas thrown across the board.” – Yohan Sheth, Coordinator PR Externals
Every PR volunteer knows the struggle of getting a “perfect reel”. Behind every viral reel is someone crouching in impossible positions to get the perfect shot. Then there’s the person who always forgets the transition, someone who bursts into laughter halfway through, and another who insists, “No, no, you’re doing great, just one more take.” Ten takes later, everyone is exhausted, the reel lasts all of fifteen seconds, and somehow, every retake was worth it. And the guiding hand of our beloved Puddles in the foyer? You know it: it’s a PR volunteer who is as lost as Puddles is.
“Come buy tickets for Zindagi Do Pal Ki”, you hear as an enthusiastic PR volunteer comes up to you with a poster in their hand, and then you know the drill—they try to tell you how fun the event is and how heart-touching the performance is—and before you know it, you have the ticket in your hands. And the funny part? A PR volunteer sold the IPA pre-event ticket to the IPA OC herself! That’s when you know they’ve done it right.
If you’ve ever had a volunteer pester you about following the Malhar Instagram page, don’t be mad at them! That’s their job. (Even convincing the CP himself to follow the page, because the FY volunteer didn’t know he was in the Core!).
The FnD team, however, has its own rituals. Someone is always lying on the floor to get a dramatic angle, someone is climbing onto a chair because “the composition will look better,” and then there’s the one who always tries to lighten the mood of the volunteers in the picture by cracking jokes when they were supposed to keep a straight face. FnD is at every event, taking a minimum of 500 pictures per event (yes, they probably even have a new SD card every week because the number of pictures per event keeps increasing!). What do they do after clicking the pictures? Their supposedly least exciting task—sorting. Be it 2 p.m. or 2 a.m., they connect their SD cards to their laptops and sit and sort through the 1000 pictures they clicked during the event. Nevertheless, FnD always has each other’s back—sometimes helping one another for a shoot, capturing each other during pre-events or main days because “nobody clicks our pictures,”. Sometimes, the volunteers do not know who the OCs or OGs are in an event, and they end up clicking pictures of all the audience members in the hopes that one of them is the OC or OG!
“If I had to describe FnD in 3 words, it would be—Chotu-sa Pyaara-sa Family.” - Arpit Jonathan Pillay, OG FnD.
Sometimes, they don’t even go home to sort them. Sitting in the Bonet lab, with the entire team, they sort 1000 pictures and compress them down to the best 100 pictures. Rumour has it that the folder named “FnD Malhar 2026” has 10 folders within it, and 10 more within it. When I asked the FnD workforce about this, all they could say was, “A non-FnD person would actually be traumatized by this.”
If you have cried while the Aftermovie played in the Quad on the last day, or ever find yourself going back to watch the Aftermovie even after 6 months have passed since Malhar ended—you know FnD did their job right. FnD doesn’t just capture moments; they preserve them. They capture the moments we are too busy to notice—the slight nod before an event begins, the silent hand gesture to tell someone to take a breath, or the hugs that silently mean we made it. And apparently, their main goal while making the Aftermovie is to make you cry (so cruel!).
“I think the most memorable experience in FnD is when you see the aftermovie you've spent months working on is finally screened in the Quad. It's like a final cathartic moment for the whole team, like our small way of saying, we did it, all of us, together. Every small ripple from everyone in the workforce, culminating in this maybe 30-minute video, a collective cry of saying, actually, in this moment, we existed. The hundreds of lives overlapped, and this is the proof of all that. It feels like finally saying goodbye to the season, looking forward to more for some, looking back for others, like giving your friend a hug when they're leaving for a long, long trip.” - Adrian Dias, OG FnD
So maybe with the Aftermovie, their job is to make us cry, but that’s only because they’ve mastered the art of reminding us that some moments are far too beautiful to stay confined as just memories.
Both these teams turn passing moments into memories. They remind us that Malhar not only exists on the stage or in the Conclave lineup, but also in the laughter between the events, the silent camaraderie that forms, and the pictures that capture you doing something you don’t even remember doing. Years from now, someone will open their “archived stories” folder, or the Aftermovie that was tucked away into the “saved” folder on Instagram, and for a few fleeting moments, they will be back in the Quad. They’ll hear the music, remember the faces, and maybe even shed a few tears. And that is the magic of FnD and PR—even when the banners go down and the Quad becomes quiet again, they ensure that Malhar still lives in everybody’s hearts.