The One Hit Wonders

March is a magical time in Pune. Not just because it comes after February which, frankly, is a month I don't much care for and detest with all my heart simply 'cause it ain't January, which is a month I gots the hots for. But anyways, getting back to the point, when March arrives in Pune, it brings with it an atmosphere of festivity and celebration to all the college campuses scattered across Pune. The reason behind all this youthful exuberance being, March is that time of the year when the most culturally significant event in any college-goer's life occurs. The Annual Social Gathering.

The Annual Social Gathering is a huge deal in Pune. It is a unifier of sorts, bringing together once every year the studious bookworms and the academically disinclined, the dysfunctional hostelites and the smug city-slickers, the musically challenged and the artistically handicapped, the overbearing professors and the overly sensitive janitors. And working together as a team, this melange of humanity, through sheer hard work, will power and the primal desire to leave its assprint on the bedsheet of history, organizes and puts in motion this event, the Annual Social Gathering.

The Gathering consists of a number of mutually exclusive events. Various competitions are held on the college campus that celebrate excellence in fields such as street art, street acting and street walking. The winners get to keep their dignity and also quite possibly receive an award at the hands of the college principal, subject, of course, to the extraordinarily remote possibility of the award money not already having been pilfered by the notoriously nimble-handed Gathering staff. Fashion shows are held, dances are performed, individual musical offerings of a classical nature are made to a largely apathetic audience and the entire thing finally comes to a close with the biggest event of them all, the great grand-daddy of the bunch; the orchestra show.

Being leader of the college band has its perks. For one, you get treated with a great deal of reverence. And even if you've actively campaigned for the other party in last year's elections for the Gathering administrative posts, as long as you're in the college band, you don't get dragged to the hostel and beaten up along with the rest of your buddies after your guys lose the elections. This invulnerability to post-election brawls surely is the biggest perk of them all.

But there are other minor perks associated with the title as well. You get to preside over the singing auditions that are held in order to choose the vocalists who will be presenting the "individual flowers encompassing the garland of songs that is the show" (to take a marathi phrase and tear it apart). Anyone who was present during the Samudra Manthan, that tumultuous event in mythical history when the Devas and Asuras embarked on a joint effort to churn up the oceans of milk to find out what lay beneath, will relate to what happens during Gathering singing auditions. As was the case during the Manthan when the relentless churning led to a number of agreeable artifacts coming up to the surface such as Kamadhenu (the wish fulfilling cow), Airavata (the white elephant) and the television remote control, singing auditions frequently bring to the surface a number of extremely talented singers who would otherwise have tragically lain hidden away from the public eye for all eternity. But just like how churning the ocean also led to a lethal pot of poison turning up, singing auditions can also inadvertently shine a glaring spotlight upon the malodorous dregs of society who walk this planet secure in the misguided belief that their singing talents lie somewhere between excellent and divine.

These folks can be categorized into various types. Some are plain crappy singers. Those are the easiest to deal with. Far more difficult are the ones who sing fairly well but have other bizarre behavioral idiosyncracies. Like the guy who holds the microphone in his left hand while he sings into his right. Or the girl from the production engineering department who goes into such paroxysms of ecstasy when the mostly male crowd applauds her entry on stage that she forgets to sing, instead, allowing the rest of the band to continue with the song as they wait for her gradual descent back to terra firma. Then there's the guy, your senior, kind of a pompous asshole, who's a decent singer, but who is never averse to replacing the lyrics of the song he is singing with products of his own imagination, some of them not even owing allegiance to any discernible language. Fortunately, he sings with his eyes closed, which allows you and the rest of the band to guffaw, albeit silently, at his goofiness.

But the cream of the crop is the One Hit Wonder. He belongs to a species comparable to none other. The One Hit Wonder is unique, in that, even before the onset of the academic year, he has already decided that he will be singing in the Gathering show. And since he is shrewd enough to diagnose the paucity of singing talent contained within himself, he resolves, through pure hard work and year-long perseverance, to finally nail down one and only one song that he will be able to see through to it's logical conclusion. And he has a formula. The formula is this : First he chooses a singer, most commonly Kumar Sanu 'cause singing in a nasal voice comes naturally to most people. Then, he chooses a song. Finally, through endless hours of practice, he manages to imitate the singer through every nuance of his vocal gyrations in that song until he and the singer sound exactly the same. And this impresses the judges at the auditions because, c'mon, sounding exactly like a singer is pretty hard to achieve. Little does the judge know the amount of hard work that went behind this feat.

However, there is a small problem. This is the last time we will see the One Hit Wonder on stage. Next year he will be gone. He will never be able to sing anything else again in his entire career. Like the male Atlantic salmon who spends his entire life fattening himself for the sole purpose of swimming all the way upstream for that single mating opportunity, and dies right after he sprays his jizz all over the female Atlantic salmon's eggs, the One Hit Wonder performs his one song and then, for all practical purposes, he is dead to the world. Because he has molded his voice into the likeness of Kumar Sanu in "Dil Hai ke maanta nahi" so thoroughly that his voice will never ever adjust to any other singer or song style again. Basically, his voice is similar to a block of stone that has already been hewed into a figurine. That stone will never again assume any form other than its current one. And that is fine. Because in his own small way, the One Hit Wonder has already acted out his part on the stage of life. He has shone at his performance and now he will move on to other, hopefully better things. But never, I repeat, never ever, will he sing again. And that is life.