On Thursday the 28 November 2013, the three days Bijapur Leadership Camp started with a lot of buzz in Muttagi village, with 60 participants from various colleges across Bijapur, Bagalkot, Jamkhandi, and Talikoti. The participating colleges included the KSW university, Darbar BBA,BCA, Chetana BBA and BCA , Jaygurudev BSW and MSW from Bijapur, SRN Arts and MBS Commerce college from  Bagalkot, Sri kaskatheshwar Art and Commerce college from Talikoti, and  BLDE BBA college from  Jamkhandi.

Day 1

The day started with inauguration by the participant leaders themselves by singing a camp song specially designed for the leadership camp. The exciting day began with a session by Mr. Ravi Bisaguppi from Bangalore who engaged the student on the topic “living life as a leader” wherein he focused on goal setting, personality development and stage skills. The students actively engaged themselves in the session asking some thought provoking questions.

Post lunch the students actively engaged in chart presentation on learning they had in the earlier sessions. Then the students had their second  slot on “Basic Legal concept”  by Advocates Mr.Santosh Kadi  & Mr.S.V.Allagi  from Bijapur who threw some light on basic legal concepts, thoughts on consumer forum, family court, write petition , court hierarchy and basic articles from the  Indian constitution. The session was conducted by showcasing videos, PowerPoint presentations and the activities also helped the students to understand the topics easily. The students had a healthy interaction and a question answer round was also conducted wherein all their queries were answered by the guest speakers.

The third slot of day 1 was power packed with cultural performances where in the students performed dance, drama and monoacting.  It was amazing to see the creative juices of the participants flowing out. This was followed by blind adventure activity where in the participants were blind folded and were left out in the open  and were asked to go from point A to B  facing all the obstacles and troubles which came their way. The main purpose of this activity was to sensitize the participants about Blind people, and also to make them realize the importance of eye donation. After another 15 minutes break, it was now the time for the thrilling Treasure hunt where materials were kept at different places and clues were given to find them out in a given time. The objective here was to challenge the decision making and planning skills of the participants’. The day saw a close at 3.15 am.

Day 2

With just 2 hours of sleep the very eager participants woke up at 5.00am in the morning, the day marked a start with pranayama and meditation after which the participants were made to play many games to charge up their energy and the we headed to the sightseeing, we visited Vijay vital temple, Narshima temple & Saraswati puskarni which were the architectural marvels. This was followed by a session by Mr.Ajay Suman Shukla functional head at the LEAD Deshpande foundation Hubli. Mr. Ajay started off with the Brainstorming session which helped participants to come up amazing ideas and the same were presented at the creative presentations slot. He also held some sessions on “self evaluation” and” goal setting”. The session was very interesting and useful for the participants to understand their own self and help them set their goals accordingly.

Post lunch Mr. Hanmanth from Bagalkot conducted a sessions on “strength of leader”, “problem solving” and “ self identification in society” where the student understood how the leaders face problem every single day and they can overcome the problems and how to solve them, and also few points were shared on how can get identified in the society . More over theoretical concepts were kept minimum and importance was given to experiential based learning, where the students practically made to do things from which they had tremendous learning. After this the participants were given the task of designing a cultural drama with social messages, at the end of the given task they came up with  remarkable dramas with social messages like blind believes and was followed by   patriotic and folk dances.

The last slot for the day started with idea generation, astonishingly 50 ideas were generated in a span of 60 minutes and 26 project finalized to be executed. Then the leader who had completed their projects presented how they turned their ideas into reality which was followed by group discussion, and interaction among the participants. This marked an astounding end to the second day.

Day 3

The participants kick-start their day with the adventurous trekking for about 10 kms on a nearby hill, they explored the caves, lot of activities/icebreaker were conducted followed by group photo session n tea. This was the day where their creative skills would be tetested; yes the participants had the long awaited creativity and innovation session. We had Mr.Radhakrishna Nayak, senior program manager for LEAD Deshpande foundation. The session started with the exciting icebreakers in the 1^st ice breaker the participants understood on how important it is for one to concentrate and focus on the goal , it made them realize that’s it is challenging to focus with the challenges and obstacles but they also understood that it’s not impossible.  Then the participants were made to feel at ease in the jiving session filled with lot of energy, then  the participants moved to the creativy session where they made posters on leadership, social issues like dowry, smoking, global warming and so on . After which they had creative presentations of the posters they made to distinguished guests and to their co participants. 

The creativity session was followed by preparations for the leadership camp valedictory function. The participants were very enthusiastic as they were the people who had planned for the event and they quickly managed to arrange everything within time, they had tremendous flow of energy, and the faces were shining bright like the sun the leadership camp had already started showing results

For the valedictory Mr. Siddhu  Pujari, presided over the ceremony, we had  Mr. Dinkar joshi  as the chief guest .Mr. Hanmanth  and Mr. Radhakrishna  were the special guests , Mr. Prashant, Mr. Ullas  organizers of the leadership camp were also present during the ceremony.

Event was planned organized and executed by the leaders. No stone was left unturned. The function kicked off with the invocation song of goddess Sarashwati Ji, followed by the bulletin on the whole 3 days leadership camp. The leaders shared their perspectives on how the camp had changed their mindsets and way of thinking .This was followed by speeches from the chief guest Mr. Dinkar Joshi and Mr. Siddhu Pujari who motivated the participants with stories on Vivekananda and asked to be the torchbearers of change.  At the end the guests were felicitated and a video made on the 3day camp was showcased and vote of thanks was given by Mr. Prashant Deshpande, Program Manager for LEAD Bijapur.

This was not an end but just a beginning for a new start, the participants were transformed from caterpillars to butterflies and now they had wings to fly ,they all had that spark in their eye, a will to change, a wish to learn more and  a dream to change the world.