YOYO \m/

(Story written when I was 24. So the language I've used might sound relatively kiddish and I didn't feel like changing it)

I'm working - yeah right ! 

This is a long story.
I would suggest you read it on a Saturday evening or even better - read it when you're in office - you know, when you're 'working' :P













So, here we go on the first one.

Hey, but wait. Look at  today's date.. It's April 26th.. It's my birthday Aaaw....So I think it is only customary for all of us,
atleast me myself to wish me myself a very Happy B'day before the awsome story starts.. yeah !!!!

Let me not brag more about turning 24. Lets jump straight into this story.

So, 24 and ticking. If I had to like list down the craziest things I’ve done in the order of their craziness factor, this one would be one of the key contenders to top that list. This one's called the 

"YO-YO" story

Year: 2011 - Final year at IITM    Month : Jan 3 rd week - last few months before graduating.

 The Background:

Ok. So, I used to have this major crush on a girl from my school days. Let's call her "Chocolate Fantasy" for the time being. (Reason for this name will be known to the readers once they read the story "My Eternal Blissful Parabola / The Coffee Day Story " ) 
For the time being, just accept that there was this girl from my school on whom I used (:D ) to have a major crush for like almost more than a decade and let's just call her Chocolate Fantasy. 

Thts actually Choco hola. Chocolate fantasy is just the cake part. But this pic seemed so yummy 

During my college days, I used to find different ways to get my head off this Chocolate Fantasy. And this YOYO story is about one such random distraction that I found for myself.

To sum up the story before it even begins so that you guys have a sense of direction and are not lost once it starts - it's about this car crash - 
this awesome wonderful brilliant car crash due to a random distraction - 
a crash which I would Soo love to relive and experience once again




So, I'm guessing some people have this habbit (not sure whether this a good one, but anyway) of generally going through random FB profiles of random friends/ friends of friends on facebook. Even though now, I consider myself a lil too mature for all that ( :P ), I happened to randomly see the profile of a random chic

                                       Oh. Tht's a nice Sock. I've put this pic here for no other reason. Trust me  :P

Happy Random Chic :P

  Now, since this story has a lot to do with this random chic, it's only appropriate that I give her a name . Her initials are A and P (AP). It rhimes a lil with Happy. So, lets just call her Happy (yeah, i know, its a lil odd, but my brilliant brains couldnt really come up with anything better)


 So, as of now, we have 2 characters - Chocolate fantasy and Happy. and Happy is the so called temporary distraction that I found to get my head off the chocolate fantasy. Chocolate Fantasy will no more be part of this story fyi.

 Who's Happy? The Obsession begins....

A friend of a friend of mine. I hardly even knew this friend of mine. She had just added me coz i was her senior at school. But I happend to see Happy's pictures randomly on this friend's photos and I just thought she was cute. And for some random reason, (please dont ask me how or why - i just do not know - certain things cannot be explained logically i guess), 

                                                                         

Used to randomly visit her profile for no particular reason. The good thing was that the distraction as such was working. For a few weeks, Chocolate Fantasy was outta my head for good but this Happy Girl Obsession was just really hitting me hard. 



 She's not my friend on FB / I knew absolutely nothing about her/ her whereabouts or anything at all except that she's studying in one of the engineering colleges in Kerala. 


  When you're studying in a campus like IIT and realising day by day that with your college life ending (remember, this was in my final year), your chance at relationships nd all that are dropping big time and sometimes, face it, it'll drive you nuts. So this was one such time. I do not really wanna get into how obsessive i got over this, but just accept at face value that I was a lil insane in this regard. Now, that's the background info you need to know before the story begins  ( so, it has not started till now huh ???? dude !!! too much man... --- chill,i'm just building it up....)

Event / Location: One of our final booz sessions at GRT  (Godavarihostel Roof Top)

 So Saarang ( IITM's annual cultural festival) just ended. Saarang has this thing called Dance workshop (an event created by IITians for providing themselves a platform to dance with a chic).

 So, that year, like EVERY OTHER YEAR, some of us had the "elite" oppurtunity to sit in the stands and watch the couples dance. And we had never missed that oppurtunity all 4 years. Except that we honestly did not want to be given so much respect and were a lil disappointed that all 4 years, we were part of that privileged LOT. 

Us @ The Dance Workshop :D

Now, we were discussing all this and abt the fact that insti life is almost over and on this particular front, we werent really able to cash in. So, once u're 3-4 larges down, logic really does not come into picture anymore. People start talking random bull sh*t.  This story is about one such statement that I made based on the above mentioned "Happy" Obsession of mine during this boozession. 

So, these friends of mine also knew a lil about this obsession of mine and used to make fun (well, who wouldnt have...) anyway, So I came up with a theory after I was decently nicely buzzed during this session.  I think it'll be more fun if I state it in first person with the buzzed tone.

"Ok. So, I know I'm crazy following some random chic on fb. but think about it, if it were meant to be - i need to meet her. and where would I meet her ??? 

Hmm... (thinkin... and here comes the awsome idea) .. Ok. So, if she were like, my kinda person. She would be a YOYO Girl. Now, if she were a YOYO girl, she would definitely be into YOYO things and YOYO events. So, if it were meant to be, first and formost she should be YOYO and if she were YOYO only would it make sense for me to actually invest time on this. So, i thought, if she was YOYO, where can I possibly meet her. (Then, it just struck me that Saarang had gotten over and I remembered abt this fest called Raagam -Cultural Festival of NITCalicut, which is apparently the biggest culfest in Kerala.) So I thought, if she was a proper YOYO type, she should be YOYO enough to actually go for such  events (else, she wouldnt be YOYO and then it means she's just not my type). So I hypothesized that assuming Happy to be a YOYO girl, she'll definitely attend this Raagam festival at NITCalicut since it's the biggest festival in Kerala. Then, if that's the case, I should go there as well. I knew Raagam was sometime in March.  So, I told my friends that brilliant idea " We should go and perform at Raagam. I know that none of you've actually ever performed live on stage before an audience of such scale, but it'll be insanely awsome if we could go there and pull it off. And obviously, if I could meet the YOYO girl, Nothing like it !!!. "

WIFI !!!  (Wifi = Wireless HiFi :P)

Girl with YOYO  :P

I had actually performed with different bands at Saarang and other events before, but none of my friends with whom I was boozing that day had actually done anything to that scale till then.

It should have been the booz i guess. Everyone said "Yes, We'll do it. We'll do it. !!! "

YOYO !!!

and we all were overwhelmed and burst into bigtime laughter assuming that it was a joke as such and nothing worthwhile could happen later. 

 On the next day, all sober, we all thought that "yes, eventhough its such a random idea, we can give it a shot." I mean, what's there to loose.  

And we can possibly think of it as something awesome that was done during our last months at college. And surprisingly, we all agreed to go and perform. 

Now, there were a lot of constraints playing around. There were too many of them for me to remember. Some of them that I can think of are:

1. 2 of us (I and Crack) were passing out that year. We had our final  year projects to cater to. Performing at the biggest culfest in Kerala would involve substantial effort in terms of practice time / travel to Calicut etc. (coz face it,  you dont really want to go make a fool of yourself there. Yeah, I know, the priority here is the Happy YOYO girl, but still we really dint want to just go there and showcase ourselves as losers)

2.The dates of Raagam were such that the day after the day we would return from Raagam, i had my project mid review. Now, considering that my previous review went really bad and I was given something like a warning, taking such a risk should have been really thought of.

The above 2, though constraints, dint really seem so much to bother either me or Crack. The next ones are  quite big

3. Ok. So, I knew how to play the drums and the guitar. Crack knew how to play the keyboard and guitar. Sticky knew how to play the keyboard. Blucky could sing. But this alone couldnt do. We needed a bassy to complete the band. And none of the other junta in our group really knew anything about music so much. We were lost and thought we'd have to give up on this random adventure. 

Enter JAC.  He says that he would like to attempt it.  

He has had no previous music background. He probably just knew that a guitar is an instrument which makes some noise / that SRK had used a similar thing in that old DDLJ movie, but nothing more than that. i guess (Sorry, Jac )  But with so lil time in hand, teaching someone bass guitar from scratch seemed close to impossible.

4. Well, it was not like anyone could go and randomly perform at Kerala's biggest culfest. 

There were obviously certain formalities. We had to send in a video entry of our performance. The event organisers would watch it, judge it and if it's good enough,

we'll get shortlisted to perform. And considering that this particular band of ours had never performed before at an event of such scale and with us having virtually no bassy, chances were extremely slim to get shortlisted.

 

The above + a lotta other constraints were indeed there -  but all of us were some how determined to go perform and show off. Well, when you obviously get the opportunity to perform at that platform and the fact that we're all from the so called IIT, even though not very probable, it was definitely possible that some of the other single friends amongst us could also try their luck. So, everyone had enough and more enthu and we decided to keep other things aside and work hard for this.

With no other option in hand, I decide to teach Jac the bass. We had like hardly 2 weeks or so to teach him, prepare a video and send it to the event organisers. 

I and Crack understood for one, that there was no way that Jac could learn bass the way it should be learnt within the timeframe we had. We decided to make our own way of playing the bass - just good enough for people listening to the music to realise that "Oh, they have a bassie" and we did somehow manage to teach him that. Kudos to Jac for all the effort  for learning it. 

And btw people, after teaching jac the bass, I can guarantee you that I'll be able to teach you as well as anyone you tell me the bass in less than 2 weeks and you can call yourself a bass player and tell your friends abt it even though you know no sh*t. Think abt it, cool no??? :D

  
Neway, after bigtime efforts to teach jac the bass, something that seemed like music was finally coming out. Jac was like a programmed machine. Once the song starts, Jac was so into the  song to ensure that he follows exactly what he had been told, so precise and exact that he would just be looking at the bass with no consideration whatsoever about the external surroundings. 

I remember this one time, where the rest of us had stopped during the practice for some reason, but Jac was just going on and on and even when someone had asked him to stop, his programmed mind was oblivious to such commands.








So, we wanted to perform something very different and make ourselves very unique. So, there was this band called UDAAN, (I think they dont exist anymore), but they had performed at Saarang a couple of times before and they had won the Light Music Competetion. So, Basically, they were like this awesome band which made awsome own compositions. And all of us actually liked their music. They were a Chennai based band into Hindi music.



We basically wanted to Stand out and be noticed.

Since we were kinda sure that people in Kerala wouldnt have really heard their music before, we were like if we perform UDAAN's songs, there is no way that the event organisers or the audience could really relate to any of the songs that they knew (ie, they dint have any benchmarks to compare our performance with). 

SO, it's like if you are gonna perform say a popular no: like "Woh Lamhein" or "Aadat" etc., chances are very high that we would screw it up and more importantly, people listening to it would easily recognise that a bigtime screw up was made. 

But at the same time, if we perform some random song which no one knows but musically, it sounds decent, even if we screw up, the audience would be forced to think that "Oh, so this is how this song sounds" since they wouldnt have heard it before. 
(Yeah, i know, too much explanation for such a simple but brilliant idea !!!)



So, likewise we decided to play 3 songs along with a sound check. Now, before that we had to send in our entry. So, after great painstaking efforts to teach Jac the bass, bunking classes and staying up late for practice sessions, paining a lot of our other musician friends for help etc. etc. etc., we finally came up with an Okayish entry video of the 5 of us performing this song called Chaahat by UDAAN and we were like wonderfully "Happy". 


We werent really bothered if we got shortlisted or not coz we were extremely satisfied that we could spent some quality time just attempting this. (Well, that's what I agreed to when one of my friends stated it. I definitely wanted to get shortlisted, go perform and show off :P )

Yeah, So, just a reminder - Don't Forget why we're doing all this

Btw, parallely, it would be a grave mistake if I do not tell you that I was just going nuts about the whole thing - my obsession was just growing and growing. 

Even though I knew at heart that chances are close to 0 for the meet up to happen, I'm sure there was some part of me which always thought ki, what if after all this it actually does happen - It would be a moment of SO much Bliss !!!

After sending in the entry, there was a couple of days of wait. We were all a lil tensed, but no one really showed it off. Parallely, we had started practising the other songs, since somewhere inside, everyone thought that 

"Considering that this has been so Crazy till now, chances are very high that Nature would want to continue this randomness and hence, would play God and most likely get us shortlisted."

So we like practiced a few songs (mostly Udaan) and we thought ki "Fine, we have some normal songs which sound okayish. But, something is missing.  we should have something more unique - something people there would have never heard before - something that they can prbbly remember us by just in case we go there and perform." 

So after a hell lotta discussions (details about these discussions itself would take an entire post to explain, so I'm just gonna cut short here), we came up with a sound check song which would be performed at the beginning before the actual songs and this was indeed our highlight..

And guess what, it was a song which was a medley of a Telugu Song + a Malayalam song with the chorus singing "Sound Check, This is the Sound Check !!! Sound Check, 
this is the sound check !!!"

:P

and it was Kickass I tell you. And after this, we were all so desperate to get shortlisted coz we invented an awsome piece ourselves and we SO wanted to perform it on stage. Twas Bloody KickAss !!!

Shortlists have come out:

And Hurray !!!  - We were in. We really were IN !!! Couldn't believe it.

Yeah, So, I do not know whether I can actually describe in words the feeling we had when we knew we got shortlisted. But, our reaction was  somewhere in between the 2 reactions you can see above and below.

 WIFI!!!


Just to remind you once again -

-A 5 piece band, which has never

performed together in front of even a small stage audience,  with a 2 week year old amateur bassie has been shortlisted to  perform music at the Grandest Cultural Festival in Kerala in front of 100's or possibly 1000's of people.Tht was just SO COOL. 

We were all so overwhelmed. So overwhelmed that when we actually saw our band's name on the Raagam website, some of my friends started getting cold feet. "Abey yaar, we'll be laughed at" "We can't compete with bigtime bands" etc etc etc. But as you would imagine, all of us pushed each other and were sure we'll go there and perform. Oh shoot, I forgot to tell you our band's name.


So, We were 5 of us ( drums - rondY (that's me - Issac), vocals - bluckY (Nikhil), keys - stickY (ashwin), bass - jackY (Jac) and guitar - cracK (Alex) )- These names we got were during our ragging sessions in first year. Each name as such has a meaning / funda to it. Getting into all that will be too much of a digression and would require a separate post in itself. Just know that we were known by the above names in insti. Everyone at IIT has such a name. So, we wanted to get a good band name.  The whole thing was just too random. So, we decided not to think too much and just collated the last letters of our insti name and came up with Y4K ( yeah, i know we could have come up with something a lot better, but can't really go back and change it, Can we ? )

 

So it was Y4K shortlisted to perform at Raagam.

Then it was just practice and practice and practice. Weekends / weekdays -  we used to practice for hours just to get our standards better. Now, i'm not gonna be rambling more about practicing. It'll make you feel that it was like a very serious thing we were working for, which indeed was not. "Happy" was all that was wanted. Just understand that we practiced a hell lot and we had a couple of songs ready.

Here We Go

So, it's time to travel to Calicut. I had to convince some of the others to bunk some of their classes as our performance was gonna be on a weekday. Considering all the effort that we had put in, there was no way we were gonna let it slip and pack the whole thing on account of 1 or 2 lectures. So, finally we packed up. From insti - Central via Metro train and from Central to Calicut via train. All throughout, we, the lazy bumps managed to carry 1 big keyboard / keyboard stand / 1 bass guitar / 1 electric guitar / 1 acoustic guitar / some other stuff / all our bags for the 3 day adventure.  

We also had Rashid along with us ( Moral support, I guess), and was awesome fun to have him along....

And finally, we reached NIT Calicut on the D Day. We were to perform on the same day. It seemed as if we had forgotten everything we had practiced. All of us had a ton of friends at NITC. So, we dumped our instruments/stuff in their rooms and were wandering outside enjoying the event ( at the same time, a little tensed as well  - obviously)

The moment I landed on the campus, I started my search for my YOYO Happy. I scanned the entire campus.

 but luck was not in my way. 


But i thought, it would be only fitting if she walked in while our performance was going on and after a massive killer drum roll of mine or something. So, I waited. 

Waited thinking that the right moment is a few hours away and it's still possible for miracles to happen.

I really dont remember what all we did that day before the performance. We were tensed, practiced a lil in our friends' rooms, met a lot of friends whom I had not met for Ages. 

And yeah, my brother was studying in the same college and he was in his first year. So, I really couldnt tell all this Happy thing to him. I just told him that "yeah, we are some awesome dudes from IIT and we're gonna rock Raagam  man....". For some reason, he found it very amusing and cared to take it only as casually as I told him. Anyway. So, all said and done, here arives the -----

The Moment of Truth

Somehow, news spread across the NITC campus that a couple of IIT dudes are in town to perform. This was breaking news across the campus.

Ours was the last performance of the day. The one's that performed before us were really good. We had all our instruments set up. 

My bro (who's also into music) was in front helping us out with the sound and all. And when we looked at the audience, we were just awestruck. It was brilliant. The crowd was full. And I mean, So effing full. People were cheering for us all around the place.

I had a very strong feeling that amongst the nearly 1000 people watching us, somewhere, sitting behind some random guy whom only I could see sat Happy, not realising that this whole thing was meant for her. And I had the strongest drive to go on stage and say "This one's dedicated to Happy", but that would have just been too non-Jojyish and too-bollywoodish. So, i kept it to myself. 

We gave a small intro about our band n all. And there we went. The music began. (I'm not gonna be describin abt the songs we played. It'll get too music-techincal.) So, lets just accept that we played some good sh*t. And you wont believe it - The 20 mins we were on stage was just too brilliant. It was like we were on top of the world. 

We played better than we had ever played before. It was such a natural flow of words and music. 

All throughout, i was searching and searching for Happy's face in between the crowd in front of me. I was looking at all the faces of people sitting and standing straight in front of me....... (not realising that there is also a perpendicular direction). 


Yes... you guessed it right. It did happen. The performance was over and I was just soo happy that we performed that well, but would have been more happy if I could have been able to see Happy be happy to watch me perform for Happy. ( :P ) 

And then, the crowd was just cheering and applauding bigtime. I remember one of the judges getting up and bowing in front of us to acknowledge our awsomeness and right after that, when I had turned right, I saw.. I saw.... yes... I saw what I thought was Happy standing there with her friends and applauding.

Yes.. she was there. It was my moment of truth.   The feeling I had was unreal. It felt like an out-of-body-experience to see her there. And considering that now I've seen here, there is no way on earth that I was gonna let go of this oppurtunity to meet up with her. 

And I jumped off my seat and started running towards her only to trip on a loose guitar cable and fall down head first and come back to reality to realise that I was dreaming..

dreaming all throughout. The performance had not even started. I was just sitting in front of my drumset and realised that "yes, it's possible to dream with your eyes open as well" :D 



(Common, it would have been just too bollywoodish if the above were true and on top of all that, if I had said we won the competition there, then that would have been IT - couldnt have asked for anything better but again, reality is reality. That's precisely why you call it reality. 

So, just in case you dint get it, everything that I've written after I started the para "The moment of truth" was a big fat lie / dream / fantasy which never happened)



So what did actually happen?

OK People

So, Rewind whatever small movie that I had created for you in the above paragraph and the situation is that we're performing last and we're all ready to perform. 

Now, i wont be bringing in more dramatic content here. 

Let's just say we performed. It was an OK performance. We dint win anything. Happy never turned up. That was it. As real as it could get. 

Something we knew would be the end result all throughout, but something we wished would have turned out soo different. Nonetheless, it was a decent performance. 

There was a nice audience cheering twas evening and everyone was like shit tired i guess. All our friends at NITC had come to watch the performance and they did a lot of the cheering just to ensure that we're not disheartened or anything. Anyway, twas an awesome experience. Sometimes I wonder, how different my life would have been if that dream that I stated above was a reality - how different would it have  been if Happy actually was happy to see me perform. 

I was a lil sad - Sad that Happy was not there ... 

( nice play of words no???  thanq thanq very much. 

(oh Issac, Stut up. Dont speak. You'll ruin it) 

:P )  




 Neway, I think I like, abruptly finished the story without giving it enough feel. But, hey, there are 2-3 things I need to discuss before closing this story which'll hopefully reinvent the feel.

Do  you think that there is something wrong with the pic above?  Well, 'something wrong' would be a wrong usage. hmm...'Something fishy' ???? Observe closely.. No ??? None at all? Ok.. Let's zoom in....


Ok.. So, Jac is playin the bass in his own style. He Soo Does not want any other music-knowing-random-audience/guitarists to know his unique style of 'making the bass sound so brilliant'.... He does not want anyone to see how his magical fingers move while the bass is played. And hence, strategically, he positions the bass so that not a single person is able to see it, but at the same time the camera captures an awsome picture..seriously, awsome no???? 

The sound check song was just brilliant. We got a wonderful response for that. It was indeed some thign that made us stand out..

So, I passed out along with Crack that year. And placements were happening the next year and the other 3 were preparing hard for placements. I remember this very clearly. One amongs the 3 (dont  remember who) actually put it as a point on his resume that he was part of an IIT band that got shortlisted to perform at Kerala's biggest culfest and that we went there and performed..  Think about it.. One random boozession-hypothesis led to one of my friends actually getting a lil benefit in his career. Awesomeness. No wonder, they have corporate parties n all that sh*t.

Anyway, my 24th B'day'll get over in another 24 minutes and I'm desperate to post this today itself no matter what. May be its because of that or may be its because I'm all high now or may be it's because that's all there was to it, I think it's time to wrap this one up.

On our Way Back

We had a fregging awesome time at NITC. and the YOYO girl story is something that I always tell people so proudly when they ask me ki whats the craziest thing you''ve done coz

People, that was One EPIC Car crash... hmm... no, it's more... As Barney would say, that Crash was just

And that was the YOYO Story

So when I was doing my MBA Term 4 - I was doing this course called PVGCO (Personal Values Goals and Career Options) - I loved the course because it has a lot to deal with psychology and I just love that subject - Psychology and Math are my favorite subjects btw. So as a part of this course, we had to do an exercise which involved each student having to collect data/feedback from the students' closed ones/friends/ex-colleagues etc. and each feedback should contain 3 stories of how the student has influenced that person in a positive way. The data is collected and certain analysis is conducted. I had received the below testimonial from Alex ( Crack from the story above) ;)