TechTatva ’17: Behind the Scenes with Hospitality and Food Stalls

If Forbes magazine had a special edition for our college fests, the Hospitality and Food Stalls category would definitely trump Scrooge McDuck, Bruce Wayne, Warren Buffet, and Bill Gates combined, for there is no greater wealth than food tokens. We met the masters of the ‘coins of the fest’, for a quick conversation.

How do you select the stalls coming in for the fest?

It largely depends on the deals we get from different local businesses here. We always try to maintain a variety of flavours. One ice-cream, and soda drinks corner, one roll joint, one pizza stall, one chaat corner, and of course, one to serve shawarma. That’s the kind of diversity we try to maintain.
We approach managers of eateries, and try to convince them to put up their stall here. We negotiate the feasibility of whether items from their menu can be sold as street food; prepared and served expeditiously, or if they can be packed for customers to take them away. Finally, the eateries and our category decides on the menu, and the prices.

Other than the stalls, what else comes under your jurisdiction?
As the name suggest, we are “Hospitality and Food Stalls”. Sure, people believe we’re solely synonymous with the food stalls, but a fraction of our work involves the hospitality part, that is arranging food and water for judges, and of course, distributing food tokens, which we refer to as “Token of Appreciation”. Unsurprisingly, we happen to have a lot more friends during the fests!

Talk about the perks you get as a part of the job.
Yes, you guessed it. We have all the food tokens, the actual currency of a fest. We do get a decent amount of free food, which is entirely based on the discretion and generosity of the stall managers.
Jokes apart, we try our best to feed everyone who’s been working hard in the fest, meet the token requirements of all categories, before we use our leftover tokens.

Are you pleased with the sales so far?
The sales have been great! We also decided to allow the stalls for the Sunday after TechTatva, because the general feedback was that people can’t have enough of the food being served.

– interviewed, and photograph by Agnihotra Bhattacharya

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