“Some people see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not. This is a story of chasing a dream to create a social impact, into reality, it is typically Indian in the sense that we started digging a well when our beard caught fire but still managed to reach the water! This is the making of Hubballi Marathon 09 – Run against terrorism ( www.hubballimarathon.com ) a mega social event organized by the students of B.V.Bhoomaraddi college of Engineering & Tech – Hubli.”


Once upon a time, during the post Diwali vacations 2007, we met in Praksh’s home chaffing over sweets and snacks, our topic of the day was “Why not we do something huge, something that will halt our city for some time, why not initiate a social revolution?”, we thought of organizing blood donation camp, T20 championship and so many options, but we all were inclined towards something that will be noble and social, some thing that will touch people, fetch people and impact people, we wanted to do something that will be remembered as the “first time” in the city. Kiran, gave us an idea of a Marathon, we have Delhi and Mumbai marathons, why not Hubballi Marathon? Marathon idea was good enough but the cause or a theme was the question. We decided “Run for charity”, and we planned the occasion to be Kannada Rajyotsava or Hindustani classical music virtuoso Dr.Gangubai Hanagal’s Birthday.

We approached our most beloved and encouraging principal Dr. Ashok Shettar with a proposal to organize Hubballi Marathon 08 as a part of BVBCET college activities, he calmly listened to our presentation and replied “Ambani brothers support Mumbai marathon, Shahrukh supports Delhi marathon and why not BVB (Ashok Shettar! as we interpret) support and organize Hubballi Marathon?! “He readily agreed to do this under his aegis!

We approached Dr.Gangu Bai Hangal’s residence, and were waiting in the lobby to meet her son to try our luck. We got a shocking reply, the person who just left was organizing the first ever marathon in Hubli city and Dr.Gangu Bai Hangal was the chief guest for that event!! “That is an intelligence property theft” said Kiran, how could some one implement exactly the same idea just before we did? We thought of competing with them by organizing “OUR” marathon in parallel. They seemed pretty big than we guys in size, age, influence and the way they talked. They said they just fixed an appointment with Kunal Khemu as one of the many performers who would perform in the closing ceremony of their envisaged Marathon. We both were awe filled looking at each other with blank looks. Our prospective politician (as he is known) Kiran did not have his reach beyond Sunil Joshi at that time (After “OUR” marathon, he has also grown a lot bigger!), likes of Kunal were far. We then called an urgent Clite table top overnight meeting to digest this coup. Clite is the Central Library and Information Technology Enclave of BVBCET, we call it see-light and this is where BVBians study overnight and see light!, Prakash, Kiran and me debated many “we should have earlier…..” arguments and then took a never imagined strategic decision to stop doing whatever we were.

“Why not collaborate with them, we could still be the organizers of first marathon?” said I, “Why not we collaborate in key areas so that the projection is as if it was our event?” said Prakash! “Why not we meet them tomorrow morning to propose this?” said Kiran!! We changed the whole strategy overnight and we were with them the next morning, they agreed! As if they were waiting for us, our joint venture started with a meeting with our beloved principal, who felt fishy about the other party’s developments. He made a very wise decision of not collaborating since BVBCET would loose hold and projection in the course. But he never discouraged our initiative, (which he never does and is well known for his seamless support for the students) by saying “Why not plan the same event next year? Let’s do it bigger than what might happen this year”. We were back to Clite that night with a bit of disappointment as our principal’s suggestion would not serve our passion of organizing the first run in the city. We had long untouched our books, and it was high time, so we happened to study for the rest of the semester in the happening Clite.

We were almost done with our exams, and during the last nightout for the last paper, we discovered that there was no news about any marathon anywhere in the state since last few months!! I do not know to this day what happened to that team who were all very set to almost invite a press meet to announce the marathon a few months back! We also soon realized that Dr Gangu Bai Hangal’s Bday was over by 20 days! We were all very happy that we still had the chance to make the first marathon happen! Hubballi marathon 09 if not 08 or 07! We also resolved to keep our master plans confidential hence forth and may be file instant patents as soon as they evolved!

The next semester we had a devastating incident in India, the 26/11 attack in Mumbai terrorized the whole nation. The massacre admonished the mankind about the threat to its eternity posed by the global malediction – Terrorism. I ran into a very thoughtful post on one of the blogs online which said “Let us not only pray for our fellow men and women who lost their lives but let us also resolve within ourselves that we are strong enough to unite and do our bit to nullify this global disease known as terrorism. ” I circulated this text via sms channel and these lines compelled Kiran to suggest “Why not run OUR marathon to create unity against terrorism?” this ingenious and perfect idea was accepted and implemented.

We approached our principal once again, this time along with a new team mate (who happened to be the key person later) – Wasim. As expected, our principal uttered ever encouraging “Go ahead”! We had to do this as soon as possible before the incident turned too old, we had to begin from scratch, and all we had with us was a vision and our happening team.

People’s president Dr A.P.J Abdul Kalam and IT giant Narayan Murthy had to visit our college to inaugurate a newly constructed building. We bagged this opportunity to publicize our envisaged marathon venture by releasing Hubballi Marathon T shirts amidst and through them; this activity gave a great hype to our “would be” event across the city even before any operational planning of the event.

The next few days were very challenging and our organizational skills were put to test, we had to plan the “never before” event and execute it in less than 30 days! We then got the support of some of the most dynamic students of our college Basavaraj, Sanket, Rahil. Manohar, Sandeep, Akhila, Vishwa, Jayteerth…. to name a few. We called for student secretory meets often to proceed things further. Principal looked into the progress and was very concerned about the turn out on the marathon day since the publicity had so little time. It was then Prof Sanjay Kotbagi, Prof Veeresh Angadi and Prof M.R.Patil took over the initiative, the dynamism which they then exhibited was something out of the box, they demonstrated exceptional foresight, planning and delegation of work and within few days the event which looked chimerical, came to the state of operational possibility.

We had taken the most important responsibilities of sponsorship, publicity, registration etc which still remained in doldrums. I still remember how we approached almost all shops, vendors, brands in and around the city and presented the first ever marathon. We tried selling our event to almost all politicians, institutes and every possible commercial venture. We had not realized that recession was at its crescendo during that time. None seemed to offer financial support towards the event and we saw our shoulders lowering.

We knew we had our principal backing us, but we did not want to burden our college much, financially. We read a lot about the advent of telecom being one of the catalytic factors for these terror activities around the world and this stimulated a key idea in Wasim. “Why not we convince some telecom company that their association with our event can be used by them to publicize that they are dead against any scope for terrorism?” We presented our event to Airtel with this central idea and bingo! Airtel was the Title sponsor! This quick movement brought life into our whole team, this happened when there were only 11 days to go!

We started to realize that there was too less time to do anything but still our enthusiasm led us ahead. We had to quickly decide upon the circuit, Kiran’s team took that responsibility, tens of students rolled their motorbikes around every nook and corner of the city and finally two closely resembling circuits were proposed, there was a heated argument over deciding it but finally one of them was decided by the majority.

I was involved in blueprinting the process of execution. We did a lot of googling with keywords like “Marathon software” “Marathon management systems” etc… Often wished if we could find an opensource web based software to take care of marathon! We neither had Helicopter to monitor the race nor RFID tags for all participants to “swipe n Run”, all we could have was papers, badges and counters, it was a challenging task to come up with a robust system using these “Paper utilities” to see that the whole event was fairly contested. We had an informal “marathon management model presentation conference” where prospective engineers had to present their models! We finally came up with a marathon system where the participants had to tear and drop a piece of coupon/token into the bins placed at each of the ten counters around the circuit and run getting a “Body Stamp”! The distance interval between these counters was optimized so that the whole system became manageable. It luckily worked well for us later.

Publicity was a huge concern for us; we came up with an innovative marathon promo van that was supposed to run around the whole city getting people registered. We had reserved last 7 days for publicity and registrations (Heights of optimism!). The first day’s show was ridiculous, our van stopped working due to some engine crisis; and our banners that were put up all over the city overnight were pulled down by city municipal authority. Our sole registration counter in our college could register only 50 people!

6 days to go! we got back that night to Clite, this time with whole team, anxious and tensed like Sourav Ganguly seeing India batting 5 down, chasing 300+ plus total in that famous match of Natwest series (Which India won later). Many thoughts were proposed and implemented instantaneously. Path breaking decisions happened that night. “Why not give a free Airtel sim card to every runner?!” – We worked with Airtel and announced a Free Airtel sim card for every participant (This brought a huge profit to Airtel later) “Why not reduce registration amount?” Registration charges reduced to 50 Rs per head from 100. We envisaged to gave a T-shirt, a cap, a marathon badge and tear and throw tokens in the registration kit. And plus a Free Airtel Sim Card! “Why not have a prize even for the last person who completes the race?!” – Announced prizes for 1,2,3,4,5,10,100,200,300……..Last positions! Plus prizes for random lucky numbers!

Our Principal after looking into the 1st day numbers came into the play. He did a managerial miracle in the next 2 days. Our attractive and innovative marathon features were broadcasted in an urgent press conference. He delivered a sensational presentation to the press (he was supported by our student team that compiled that presentation); He addressed the Principals of all colleges of the city and appealed our cause and its importance for Indian youth.

We then did some lightening movements, 5 more counters were put up across the city, all Airtel users received event promo SMS. All Airtel showrooms started registration counters. BVB Students reached out the entire city, in the next 4 days an awesome 3000! Registrations happened; we never imagined that mammoth figure! It so happened that we ran out of marathon kits!! 2 days to go we have to close the registrations amidst huge demand! People started getting influence for the registrations and we had to sell registration kits without shirts at the end! We finally ended up with 4000 registrations – This event was all set to upset the whole city traffic for at least 4 hours on the coming M-day.

I can reminisce an incident where we had to print 4000 marathon badges with numbers starting from 1000 to 5000; we did not know how to do that on a PC. Our college students came up with a C program, interfacing with the Printer API to print those badges in one go! I was delighted seeing the in-house technology coming handy.

Professors of our college were alarmed by this mammoth number of registrations and they did a great job in collaborating with the city police and city hospitals for security and medical support (Luckily there were no emergencies later). Vishwa and Jayteerth, the then college student secretaries managed the ten counters, which was the most difficult part. 300 BVBians spread across the circuit (City!) did a wonderful job managing the marathon mob; they were courteous enough to offer drinks, glucose, lime juice and water looking at the face of drained participants without being asked for.

March 8 2009! The big day arrived finally! We were nervous, we were excited, we were happy and we were afraid, we were a mixed bundle of nerves anticipating good luck. I was rehearsing to read out the rules of marathon back stage and thought of peeping out once, what I saw was a never forgettable sight, the whole campus was covered inch to inch with the white T shirt participants, It seemed like a Tsunami of people looking dauntless to resolve against terrorism, to unite across all lines of cast, creed and gender, to eradicate and over through the era of global terror. It was magnificent to hear all of them repeating the marathon oath dictated by Praksh, in one voice so strong, determined and inspiring. All magnates, politicians and bigshots of Hubli Dharwad were present at the oath taking ceremony. Sandeep Unnikrishnan – the great martyr who protected his fellow countrymen during 26/11 attacks, was the most remembered and adored Hero of the event.

I could hear adhoc discussions during the run on how to strategize international diplomacy to threaten the terror; how to equip our defense better to fight such incidents; how youth can empower the military by undergoing compulsory army training; and interestingly, how peace can win over terror! I was extremely happy to see our event coming out successful in creating a mass opinion to resolve against global terrorism and provoking them to contribute their bit towards the resolution. It absolved my guilt of luring people for goodies and sim cards, I then felt that although the goodies attracted most of the people, the arrival made them resolve against the terrorism.

It was all done; four and a half thousand people of the Hubli City were having a sound sleep after their marathon run for the first time! but we were back to our table in Clite in complacence, basking in the marathon glory, overwhelmed with the coverage of evening dailies and telecasts. It was a great feeling looking back at our efforts that produced a historical run in the city and the metamorphosis of our idea into an event of this huge volume. We received series of accolades from many leaders of Hubli Dharwad like Santosh Lad and other political magnates; they also assured their support to organize this as an annual social event of the city.

This effort was also a benefactor for me since it helped me reduce my weight by 6Kgs in less than 2 months! Many people asked me tips on speedy reduction of appetite; I suggested “Why not organize a Marathon!”