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Friday, September 16, 2011

No Permission

While we continued to market and get excited about our national anthem world record event - the biggest hurdle was getting the permission from the authorities.

We started contacting every tom, dick and harry who we thought could help us in getting the permission for the event. We were common man with no links in the high-ups and whatever links we had didnt respond on our time of need.

We wrote to various government organizations asking them for permission.
Our initial crowd was 1 lac 50 thousand, naturally no one was willing to take the risk of such a big crowd, specially when we were not politically associated.

If we were any political party or a power group, we could have easily got permission but since we were common man everyone was of the view to let go the idea - It was not possible.

Seeing all the political parties getting permission to hold their rallies and dharna was frustrating us more, as we were kept hanging and waiting and waiting.

The only reply we received was from the city government that they have received our application and have forwarded to the concerned department and they will contact us soon. But they never contacted us.

My only ray of hope and thought was if GWR reduces the target and disqualifies vande matram as vande matram was not the national anthem of india but was listed as the national anthem.
For this I started faxing GWR every 10 days, waiting for even a little confirmation or any response from them or acknowledgement or reply or whatever that can satisfy me either way.
GWR wasnt replying either.

I also sent them email thru their online form, still no reply.

The target remained 150,000
No permission was insight.

I used a few contact to get permission from the governor house and involve the governor sindh in this, however mqm resigned just a few days later and governor also resigned. The plan was hanging in balance.

We continued promoting the event and it started getting some attention among facebook users and among some media houses and we got our first interview published on the express tribune blog.

http://tribune.com.pk/story/195168/karachi-youth-hope-to-sing-their-way-into-the-record-books-and-beat-india-while-theyre-at-it/

Various tv channels and media houses approached us for promoting our event but no one was willing to be associated with such a big event which involved to much security risk and which needed so much work to be done as without the permission for the venue the event was standing at zero point only.

Our second break-thru was when DAWN NEWS TV channel approached us and offered us to be our exclusive media partner. The idea seemed good , but I was of the view that we should not make any EXCLUSIVE media partner as this is a national event and all the tv channels should be allowed to cover this event and not just one, as making exclusive media partner reduces the interest of other tv channels.

Dawn did not stop us from inviting other channels to the event, however when we contacted other tv channels and told them of our association with dawn they were reluctant to offer any publicity or support to the event as seemingly they were of the view since we have already signed an exclusive media partner other tv channels will not and cannot cover this event.

This was a set back to us as we were unable to get due coverage in the media - the event continued to remain the facebook event, while we made a few appearances on some morning programs.

Time was getting shorter and the event date was coming closer.

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