Come Tuesday, and Calcuttans will be all set to wish Shubho Bijoya from the skies! Some 200 metres from the ground.
Thanks to the 600 drones, all charged and ready to dazzle the night skies over the Park Circus Maidan where the 64-bigha plot in the heart of the city is expected to host a crowd of some 50,000 people to witness a never before ariel light and sound show of ‘Ravan Dahan’ to simultaneously bid farewell to Maa Durga on Bijoya Dashami and celebrate Dussehra marking the triumph of Lord Ram over King Ravana.
Illuminating drone formations over Rashtrapati Bhavan during Beating Retreat Ceremony held on January 28, 2023 TT online
The 15-minute show is scheduled to start at 7 o’clock. And if you are wondering about the fleetingness of the show duration, it’s because that’s more or less the time limit till the drone batteries would last. But take heart from the fact that this would be the largest drone illumination show in Eastern India in terms of the number of machines involved.
Uddipani, organizers of the Park Circus Sarbojonin puja, is collaborating with BotLab Dynamics, an IIT Delhi-based tech start-up firm specializing in Live and creative drone shows besides offering technology support to the Indian defence sector in its state-of-the-art drone swarming missions, to create unique light patterns to depict the epic Ram – Ravana battle over the skies of Calcutta.
Illuminating drone formations over Rashtrapati Bhavan during Beating Retreat Ceremony held on January 28, 2023 TT online
"If China can do it, why can’t Bengal,” asserted Arjun Dhawan, organiser of the event. “Drone illuminations have mostly been used for business brand promotions but rarely for festivals and mass events like Dussehra,” Dhawan said, admitting that the idea for a show like this occurred to him after witnessing the shows in China.
With necessary clearances from the Ministry of Home Affairs for hosting already in his kitty, Dhawan is upbeat about the support he has received from the Army’s Eastern Command headquarters in Calcutta, which acted as a liaison between Uddipani and BotLab for the event, and the enthusiasm from city mayor Firhad Hakim who, Dhawan says, has already extended his abutment.
“Some 15 specially-skilled drone technicians from Delhi and other parts of the country are already holding rehearsals for the show getting the necessary coding done for the geo-fencing in the skies for the unique display of lights. What better occasion can we have to show our technology strength to the rest of the world than the country’s biggest festival, Durga Puja,” Dhawan maintained.
In effect, the illuminated drones displaying millions of Red-Green-Blue colour combinations would be positioned in pre-set formations to form both 2-D and 3-D images and texts, each depicting an episode from the epic mythological battle. All 600 drones would be operated autonomously from a single computer, it was learned.
Drone light show over the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad during the opening ceremony of the TATA-IPL tournament in April, 2023 TT online
Flying at an altitude of about 200 metres from ground level, the drones would be visible from a distance of seven to eight kilometres from the spot where they would hover, company officials informed.
Organizers promise that the experience would be no less exhilarating than the New Year over Shanghai in 2020 or the dragon boat show which lit up the night sky over Shenzen, China earlier this year.
What’s more, the swarm technology used for the show, both the drone hardware and the software required to simulate them, is indigenously developed by tech geeks of IIT Delhi. The company they formed, which will be in action at Park Circus, has already held a show at the Beating Retreat ceremony at the Rashtrapati Bhavan with 3,500 drones in January this year and etched its place for holding the second-largest drone show in the world.
Budgeted at around Rs 1 crore, Dhawan feels the show could be a trendsetter for major puja organizers in the years ahead.
