Editorial Four

When the singer's gone,

Let the song go on.

But the ending always comes at last

Endings always come too fast.

It was a rather different night. Even as I walked into the auditorium alone, the very difference with the time I had done this at the very beginning of the semester struck me at every step. The energy that marks the Music Nights was just not there in the students that filled the seats till the very end of the Audi. Tired haggard faces greeted me, some with a smile, some just with an exhausted wave. We had had 3 tests in the last three days and had, by the looks of it, managed to zuc most of them. Strands of conversations all around me still centered around the week gone past, with greetings mostly murmurs on ghoting and irritated denials.

I was fashionably late by more than half an hour, which meant I reached just in time for the start of the night. Even as I settled to a rather lonely seat behind the Soundz booth, a stream of 1981 batch people streamed into the Audi. For a moment or so, the Audi seemed to come to life. They were everywhere, taking pictures, talking to the BITSAA volunteers, dancing, singing. A special request was sent out to play “Munni Badnaam” with 50 year olds dancing enthusiastically to it.

As for me, I settled down to enjoy the music that had started by now. I woke up one and a half hours later, with Shounak's brilliant growling in Sanatorium revebrating in a mostly empty Auditorium. There were still a few energetic Alumni nodding along with it. I walked to the front. The songs changed for a softer note, and I could see psenti-semites dancing along at the left side of the Audi. It seemed like they were stuck in a time warp, for even as the songs changed those few timeless steps never did.

I walked into Neeti after a rather unsuccessful tryst at dancing with a friend. “I am going to Hyderabad for an interview,” she said. “I will send in my article once I am there.” A quick hug and she was gone in the melee of camera flashes. And surprisingly it was all around me, those little attempts to keep the soon-to-be-forgotten memories in transient ties of Facebook albums and Gtalk requests.

What is it that makes us BITSians? Is it the fact that a part of us will remain forever in those long night time strolls to ANC, shivering in the dense fog? This is the part that we will leave behind, our legacy, scratched in the all-remembering sands of Rajasthan. And love it or hate it, one day I guess we will come back to it, if only to revel in the music of a generation 25 years younger, and feel young once again. I guess we never really do say goodbye.

Rithesh had just finished singing Say Goodbye when I made my way out of the Auditorium. People were on stage packing up, when one of the Music Clubbers started playing Sheila on the guitar. And for the first time in the evening, or in days perhaps, I felt like smiling.

Life goes on I guess.