First year dreams

So I’ve been quiet over here because I’ve been awfully busy off late. One of the things occupying my time was preperation for the WTMS Annual Production. WTMS is an society that plays music inside the institute. I had the honor of being one of the three Governors of the society this year, which meant a lot of work over the past few weeks.

The show was great. We experimented with a new sound technician which didn’t go too well. But the crowd was nice, the music was good and the finale was explosive. I asked my friend Anutosh to photograph the event and some of the photographs were great, and I thought I’d share some here. Thanks to my friend and depmate Karthik Prabhu for taking photographs as well(he’s keeping the best pics from me, to edit and polish, so you might get a follow-up post).

A little bit of history now. Back in first year, when we really didn’t play anything, me and two very good friends – Ved and DC – spent more time fantasizing about stage antics and imaginary bands and songlists (trivia: we still call ourselves “Ved’s Imaginary Band” or VIB even when we perform on stage), than we did actually playing anything.

One of the things we most wanted to do is to line up next to each other, point the fretboard at the audience, not unlike the thing very characteristic of Iron Maiden. Something like this:

And four years later – lo and behold:

FYI, that’s me on the left of the image. With my best friend Ved in the middle. Vibhav – on the right – was supposed to line up as well, but he stuck to where he was prolly due to the fear of messing up the “Dance of Death” lick. We were like “clean playing be damned! it’s the photo op that counts”. In his defence his solo came out great!

Wait… Something’s not right. DC was supposed to be along with us as well. Kindof difficult since DC plays keyboards (he’s a “synthie” as they call ‘em down here). Thankfully, his E-mu XBoard 49 Midi controller keyboard comes into the rescue.

Errr…. success?

The show closed with local hero and grade-A-nice-guy Ankit “Godwa” Prasad playing a _perfect_ rendition of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” – the long extended Pulse Live version. We even projected a video of the concert in the background.

Anyways, the show was great. I was thoroughly exhausted at the end of it. An entire day of setting up several thousand watts worth of sound, setting patches and playing with some of the most talented people I’ve met in my life. And lie down on a stage – just because I could. (image – I’m in the blue shirt, DC’s in black)

Thanks to everyone who came! Hopefully I’ll get to play at Kharagpur once more before I graduate. Until then!