And it was Demo Day
And it was Demo Day.
What Demo Day am I referring to? Any guesses?
It wasn’t one of the YC-style demo days by a startup or two. This didn’t come up after a 3-month growth acceleration story.
This was my daughter’s Bharatnatyam RangaPravesha/Arangetram/Demo Day. This day marks the culmination of many years of hard work, in her case, it was more than 5 years. And the significance of this Demo, — the dance disciple gets to dance solo with an accompaniment of live music. It is close to an hour where the focus is only on the disciple, to show her prowess in dance movements, emotions and the stamina to dance for such a long duration.
From the time she started to dance, my efforts have been limited to dropping and picking her up from dance class. She used to tell me of the different things she learnt, but not having any background in the arts, I didn’t understand all that she said she was learning until it was the day before Demo Day or T — 1.
The full dress rehearsal was on T-1. I sat through the entire almost 90-minute session. It was then it struck me, how intense and involved dance is. I could see sweat trickling down her forehead at a rate equal to when I run a half marathon, but apart from the sheer physical nature of dancing, you had to show the emotions to match the song. Try telling someone on a half marathon to keep smiling and show all emotions on the run, for runners it is mostly about showing pain or trying to cover it up. Smiling or other such uplifting emotions are not on the list.
The concept of Rangapravesha is really old, maybe thousands of years. And it is such an awesome idea. This is a controlled launch before we let a dancer start performing to a wider audience. The focus is on demonstration and dancing. While dance is an art where the demonstration is the only way to know a person’s ability, I truly believe that this concept should be applied to every Skill where the output can be demonstrated. While there is just one dancer showing off the Skills, it is pure teamwork, the teacher, the singer, the instrument players all of them.
YC popularized demo day, and end of last year I was part of a GrowthX cohort and I worked with my team to prepare for a demo day. Though we didn’t make it to the demo day, the whole exercise of getting ready was enough to get me to turn into a believer in this concept.
We should have more of these, especially for students getting into their first jobs. Getting students to work on solving a problem as a group when being guided by a teacher, and these students dividing up the work, bringing all the knowledge they have gained, figuring out new things, and more importantly working as a team to get to the solution, makes women out of girls, and men out of boys.
While the current push is on getting internships for students, getting those students to solve a problem and then demonstrate it to an audience that is not just the invigilator or college faculty, is another way to get these students employed instead of relying on those controlled and standard interview techniques.
It’s time to make Demo Day a standard part of every graduation, it is a sure shot method to get these students Job Ready.
