Pressure Cooker

 

Organizing a big event within a given deadline always comes with a lot of tension and undue pressure. It is almost like the exam season when there is a huge syllabus to study from and very little time to do it in. You put in late nights, try to distribute the work among a bunch of people- some of whom are overly enthusiastic while some are grossly unwilling, try to make plans which never work out. At the end of the day, you go to bed tired, but still tensed about how little you have done all day and how much work you still have left for the next day. All these thoughts compromise on your sleep hours as well as quality of sleep, making you pissed and cranky and unable to deal with the next day’s tension thus reducing your productivity. This vicious cycle continues.

During these difficult times a coping method adopted by most people is pan-b**ching which is almost like a whistle from a pressure cooker which blows off some steam and helps to reduce the pressure. This is a system where everybody says foul things about everybody else but no one really means it. They keep complaining about how much overworked they are, how they have been attending long meetings which ultimately end up not deciding anything at all, how less the others are working, how less appreciated their efforts are, how they feel they just shouldn’t have taken the responsibility or shouldn’t have met these people. But one should not be surprised if the very same day they went back to do justice to the same responsibility with the same set of people, because they did not mean what they said. Those were just words after all.

The inability to spare time, inability to catch up causes breach in friendships and relationships alike. One wonders at times, “Isn’t it too much of a price to pay just for an event or for getting the appropriate credit for you think you deserve?” The answer to this question is complex, because of the complexities that lie in the gyri and sulci of our cerebral cortices. At the end of the day, it’s not a choice between your friendship and your work, it’s a choice between understanding and misunderstanding. It’s a choice between realizing that the person you are blaming is in as much deep trouble as you are or thinking that you are the only person dealing with a lot.

For the most part I have described the story of the overworked group, but there are two other groups in any event. The working group and the disinterested third party. The disinterested people are those who are blessed to possess Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak. Whenever the need arises to take up any responsibility whatsoever, these people simply disappear. While the working group consist of those few people who do whatever is expected of them but never ever bite more than they can chew.

The pressure of organizing a big event drives one crazy and hanging by a thread on the verge of losing one’s sanity and all social relations, one wonders, “Where did I go wrong?” At those times one must remember that while this pressure seems unbearable, it is also true that only extreme pressure makes diamonds. This pressure is probably meant to bring out the diamond in you and make you a better person in the long run.

If some of my readers are wondering why I suddenly shifted my blog content from med school to event management, let me tell you some good med students are also good event managers as is going to be proved soon. The time to be ecstatic is coming people!