"Should we just cancel it?"

"Should we just cancel it?" That question came up two days before Econclave. Registrations were at 32. Venues weren't fully locked. The ₹70,000+ prize pool was already committed. Faculty were cautious. Students were hopeful. And as President of ArthLok , the Economics Society at Shiv Nadar University Chennai, I became very aware that if this failed, it wouldn't just be "an event that didn't work." It would define our first edition.

 

That was the shift. You're not participating anymore. You're accountable. Being President isn't about visibility. It's about making decisions when things don't look good.

 

I won't pretend I wasn't reconsidering everything that week. Econclave was ambitious for a first edition. 6 events - Nations & Negotiations, The Urban Dilemma, Bull & Bear, Policy Hackathon, Money Talks, and Crowd Connect. Simulations, debates, policy design, market dynamics. Structured on paper. Fragile on ground.

 

I remember refreshing the registration sheet late at night, hoping numbers would move. They didn't. When numbers stall, doubt gets loud. The easy option was to postpone. Scale down. Protect reputation. But giving up wasn't really on the table - not because I was blindly confident, but because if ArthLok was going to mean something, it couldn't fold at the first sign of friction.

 

So, we leaned in. Follow-ups. Calls. Clarifications. Faculty conversations where I had to defend why this was still worth backing. Reworking logistics. Quiet diplomacy. Leadership, I realised, is less about vision and more about translation. You turn enthusiasm into backing. You turn caution into momentum.

 

Trust became the real currency. Faculty trusted us with credibility. Participants trusted us with their time. The organising committee trusted that effort would convert into outcome. Then in 48 hours, registrations moved from 32 to 118. Nothing dramatic. Just persistence compounding.

 

Behind the scenes, economics was playing out live - scarcity of time, shifting incentives, coordination failures until someone realigns the system. We were running simulations on stage while living one behind it.

 

It wasn't perfect. We had logistical gaps. Tight timelines. Coordination misses. And not everyone thinks it was executed perfectly, that's fair. But I'd rather improve something real than protect something hypothetical. What I'm most proud of isn't just the turnout. It's that when cancellation felt rational, we didn't default to safe.

 

ArthLok didn't build Econclave alone. Our faculty backed us when the pressure was visible, and the organising committee took on far more than their assigned roles required - the unglamorous work that builds institutions. That collective resilience is what made the two days possible.

 

Econclave 1.0 wasn't polished. But it was built.

Sometimes, building it once, even imperfectly, is the only way to make sure you never ask, “should we cancel it?” again.