A major chunk of the winter term in my venerated course is devoted to the cause of college festivals. Nine-and-a-quarter festivals later, I have begun to ponder at the point of them all. At their worst, they are a dissipation of your time. Time that could very well have been spent in planting trees around our neighbourhoods. Exaggerations notwithstanding, even the good ones end up being gallery-pleasers. I remember the first festival gig I attended in the course – Polaris 2008. A month into the course at Wilson’s, we were engrossed in organising our very own extravaganza. I remember the bands playing at the gig – there were decent covers of Pink Floyd, Stone Temple Pilots being strummed around. Yet the only time I recall the crowd going ballistic was when a particular band strummed a Bollywood tune while testing their sound logistics.
What you see is what you get. If you ever need amplification for this adage, come and observe a BMM fest. Every section of the crowd –from the organisers to the participants will invariably have a character hell-bent on making you bend and show them the space they command. They will either be asking for pointless clarifications just to show you that he/she is the point person in the group. Or they will be yelling out CIA-like pontifications on their walkie-talkies as loud as they can. BMM is strikingly consistent in churning out these types every year. Every batch in the 55 colleges in Mumbai has at least two of such types. For the sheer energy they expend in maintaining the facade of appearing important coupled with the strains of a limited vocabulary, I call them energy-suckers.
More often than not, the elevation of these energy-suckers comes piggybacking on people with real potential in them. If not anything else, Wilson’s BMM is dreaded in festivals for three years now due to its dance contingent. Naturally, there is an aura that surrounds them. Observing their rehearsals would however reveal to you that the nebula that radiates the aura is actually a black hole. The ones who can actually move their feet, prefer to just do their job and improvise. For the black holes though, practice presents a desired opportunity to boss around greenhorns and throw opinions wherever not necessary. If you have a project deadline tomorrow at 7:30 am, chances are that these energy-suckers will throw this titbit at you a minimum of 17 times as you sit awake all night doing the needful. For them, even a blank disc will do the job, as long as it is on time. Maintaining the masquerade of professionalism is important, more than actually being one. And lest you forget or don’t know, high marks look very good when put up on display boards.
A BMM classroom will never fail to entertain you. You will find opinions of all sizes and shapes thrown on everything under the sun and its devil-faced eclipse. Look out for the ones that are long and tangled but fail to throw up a single relevant nuance. And the ones that are littered with self-absorbing jargon like good but not great or the snore-inducing honestly speaking or frankly(opinions are ordained to be frank. That’s why your God created them in the first place, suckers). Nine times out of ten, these enlightening observations will be coming from an energy-sucker. My observation is that they end up joining the course lured by the outward glitz. For all that is worth exploring for novices in the realm of creativity and its off-shoots, BMM is a better world without ‘em suckers.
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