The 50th edition of IIT Delhi’s Rendezvous kicked off with vibrant competitions, inspiring conversations, and cultural showcases, setting the tone for the next days of creativity, glamour, and student-led celebration.
The 50th edition of IIT Delhi’s annual cultural festival, Rendezvous, opened on September 28th with a burst of colour, food, and ideas. Day 1 brought together competitions, conversations, and performances that reflected the festival’s legacy as one of the largest student-run cultural gatherings in the country.
The day began behind Bharati Building with ‘Alchemy’, the festival’s street art segment. Mural-making/road-painting competitions transformed blank roads into canvases, with teams given five and a half hours to work on the theme ‘Golden Threads of Time’. The idea of an “eternal journey” was interpreted in multiple ways; some focused on cycles of growth and decay, while others played with the image of time as woven strands connecting past, present, and future. Paints were provided, but many participants arrived with their own supplies, adding individuality to the collective burst of colour that quickly became a talking point for students passing by.
In Dogra Hall, the spotlight shifted to ‘Empowering Encounters’, a Q&A session with Samar Sighla, the founder of ‘Jugnoo’, and ‘Chaayos’ founder Raghav Verma. Speaking to a packed hall with over a hundred registrations, they shared stories of their IIT years, skipped lectures, late-night brainstorms, and the early struggles of entrepreneurship. Their advice was rooted in personal experience: take risks, embrace failures, chase passions and remember that campus life is about experimenting, not perfection. The candid tone of the session resonated strongly with students in the audience, who laughed knowingly, relating to the stories of missed classes and deadlines.
Fashion and flair came alive at the ‘Lifestyle Competition’, judged by author and lifestyle influencer Devanshi Sharma. With the theme ‘Gravity to Glamoraty’, the competition tested style, stage presence, and performance. After an initial online round of submissions, the top five teams made it to the prelims, performing six-to-eight-minute sequences that blended modelling with storytelling. The round ended in a rare tie for the first position between ‘Envoke and Slayers Club, with four teams now heading into the finals instead of three. The excitement in the crowd matched the confidence on stage, proving once again that Rendezvous is as much about spectacle as it is about skill.
All day long, the live setup hosted artists from across the country, selected through Google Forms and outreach by the IIT Delhi team. Musicians and performers brought their own flavours to the festival, ensuring there was always something happening no matter where you turned. The open-air performances kept the campus alive with sound and movement, adding to the buzz of competitions.
Day 1 of Rendezvous 2025 balanced artistry with entrepreneurship and glamour with grit. From roads splashed with colour to plates filled with inventive flavours, from candid entrepreneurial lessons to stage performances that tied gravity with glamour, the golden jubilee edition opened with a celebration of creativity that both looked back at fifty years and forward to the journeys yet to come.
Read Also: IIT Delhi’s Rendezvous ’25 is On!
Image Credit: Mahin for DU Beat
Anjali Kumari Jha
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