It happened a year ago at a grocery store in London, probably in the juice aisle but she can’t be sure. Six shoppers, with determined looks and to-do lists, broke into song and dance. Just like that. It was only later when she went to her dorm room (at School of Oriental and African Studies) did she find out that what she just witnessed was a flash mob.

Shonan Kothari returned to Mumbai and forgot about the grocery store experience until she saw an old bucket list. “Be part of a flash mob” it said, but there weren’t any in Mumbai. That’s when the 23 year old decided to organise her own, a 200-people strong flash mob that took place at CST last Sunday (November 27), a feat she pulled off in a month (see video here). Red tape and all. Shonan hopes that this will spawn more across the city and shares her ten step program on how to organise a flash mob with bpb:

Plan Your Own Flash Mob

1.       Pick a Venue: CST is a beautiful structure that offers a great indoor space and high footfalls, so that was my dream location for a flash mob. We’d also considered parks like Priyadarshini Park and other open spaces. It might make sense to short list a bunch of venues because some may not grant you permission.

2.      Make a Presentation and Show Up Unannounced: Create a solid presentation on what a flash mob is and how it will benefit the venue in terms of publicity, footfalls, virality etc. I didn’t have contacts or appointments at the cop station, railway station or park, so I just showed up during work hours and made sure they listened to me. I soon saw that everyone was super co-operative – that I had no commercial gain from this made it easier – and I received permissions from almost everyone I approached.  If you’re planning a CST mob, Mr Atul Jani, Senior Divisional Commercial Manager, Central Railways is the man you should be looking for.

3.     Sort out Permissions: You have to acquire three different authorisations - from the venue, as well as the BMC and police. In case of CST, there were a million internal departments that had to grant individual authorisations as well – we even needed a separate permission slip to get a ladder on the premises.

4.      Recruit Your Mob: In order to make my presentation attractive I lied about having 200 dancers on board. Since I lied, I had to make it happen. The best way to do it is send out an email to 20 of your closest friends, and get each one to recruit 20 more.

5.     Swear to Secrecy and Find a Good Practice Spot: It’s not easy to get 200 people to perform routine dance practises in public spaces and keep it a secret, but we tried our best. This involved not using any social media pre-event and splitting up practise into batches. Priyadarshini Park at Napeansea Road provided their grounds for the same.

6.     Rope in Experts for Less: If you are able to sell the idea well enough – it’s still novel in India – you can get cool choreographers and film companies to shoot the event at a subsidised cost or even for free! Ours was choreographed by Bhaumik Shah (he’s worked on a bunch of music videos and Bollywood shows) to the Rang De Basanti song because I figured you can’t go wrong with AR Rahman.

7.      Blend In: The whole point of a flash mob is to look like people at the venue, in our case, commuters.  No loud or revealing clothes, no garish make-up.

8.      (You Could) Sell Your Flash Mob: Although we kept it under wraps, word got out to a few brands who approached us for in-mob branding. I chose not to do it, but you could.

9.     Crowd Control: Where we failed was to control the crowd, who formed a ring around the first five dancers, thereby ruining the initially planned formation, as well as some really cool entries and exits. Make sure you take measures for crowd control.

10. Make it Viral: You should have a multiple camera set up at the venue to get shots from several good angles, do a quick edit and put the video online as soon as possible.

Shonan Kothari is a 23 year-old CSR consultant who previously worked as a researcher at Harvard Business School.