Saturday, March 11, 2006

Echo: Sounds of Music

In 2002, when i had entered into my second year of college, Echo took place. It was a symposium in which technical papers were presented. Apart from the hectic paper presentations which started in the morning after breakfast at around 10am would go on till lunch at 1 and then resume at 2 which will then finally end by 5pm. Rest of the time would be for fun. We had food stalls set up so that food can be taken which was atleast not the one in the hostel mess. (What can we do, we got too used to the food!!!) Apart from the food stall would be the Music stall, which had a computer with large speakers connected to the amplifier. The music was being handled by me, but ofcourse at that time the computer belonged to my senior who had let me borrow it. For 3 days I would move the computer to the college campus and start off with the music.

Since my college has many students from diverse regions with different languages, this music stall was very tough to handle. I had the usual English songs to play, apart from that the Hindi, Tamil, Telgu, Malyalam and many other kinds of songs were needed. In this particular system, I had varieties of English, Hindi, Arabic, Malyalam, Telgu but by chance I had no Tamil songs. The songs kept playing throughout the day. The worst moments were when I had seniors who were breathing over my neck just to get there songs to be played. That is when I used to get up, give it to them and walk to the food stall to have some food. During that much time they kept themselves quiet busy trying to play some song or the other but could not make up there mind who should take charge of the keyboard and mouse.

During the duration of 3 days in which I was handling the music stall, I had taken assistance of a friend of mine who knew telgu songs as I only knew about English, Hindi and Arabic songs. Those 3 days became really unbearable at points when a few seniors would try using there authority to play there songs. For me, it was important to handle songs in the sequence of requests which were given first come first serve. This sometimes got the situation heated up.

Apart from this was the Last day factor. The last day or 3rd day will always be a weekend so people had a tendency to spend their evenings at the stall for dancing and eating. So we used to keep a playlist which would contain dance numbers. Some of our college authorities never liked the idea as the dance would go on till late night and ofcourse never enjoyed the gender mixing. Those moments remind me the pressure from various people like the management, then the seniors and last but least the crowd which would be in a full groovy mood. After all this, I still remember that I had to take a complete 1-2 days rest just to get all the loud music out of my head. My ears were hurting as i couldnot hear much and then ofcourse I had lost my voice. That experience was really different as I had to try keeping the crowd happy with the different kind of music with different language which is actually a really pain staking work. Now where would one's life be without the fun of handling pain and problems.

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