Culturals

When I was in 11th and 12th, I used to go for a lot of culturals. Each experience was a different one. Some happy, memorable moments, some embarrassments, some disappointments. On the whole, the experience was enjoyable.

Let me start with the disappointments and end on the happy one. Before one of the culturals at Vidhya Mandhir, Adyar, 6 of us had practiced for a fusion dance. We practiced real hard and we were so confident of winning. Our event was only in the afternoon. So we started from our school only after lunch. When we reached there, we were all so excited. But all our excitement went down the drain when they said that our school has been disqualified and we cannot perform. It was so disheartening.

This disappointment stayed for very less time as we geared for the next one at Vanavani school in IIT campus. We went there in the morning itself to watch the other events(school cut adikanum naa odane sandhosham aache). Wow!!!!!! What a big auditorium it was!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!We were soooo excited at the prospect of perfoming on such a big stage and before a huge audience. We enjoyed throughout the morning making fun of our school mates who were having their events in the morning( pottu nalla kalaasitrundhom). I used to love the events SOS and JAM. For those who don’t know what these events are, SOS is the event wherein the situation is that a ship is going to sink and there is just one lifeboat available. Lots of celebrities will be on the ship. Each student will be given the role of a celebrity. They should convince the judges why they should be saved. The way each and every participant tries to convince the judges would be a delight to watch. In JAM, all the participants will be seated along with the judge as if in a discussion. The judge will give some topic(might be soo irrelevant and stupid), but the participants have to talk on the topic for quite sometime. If he/she makes grammatical mistakes or pauses in between while talking or forgets to say a “code word”(which will be given by the judge) and if another participant points out the mistake correctly, that person gets to continue talking. Finally, the one who blah..blah the most gets the prize. It will also be enjoyable. During the break, I went out of the auditorium along with my friend and saw that they had set a refreshments stall. I had a butterscotch milkshake there and it was simply tooooooooooooooooo good!!!

Then comes the worst part. In the afternoon they announced the adaptune event wherein they will play a mix of different songs and we have to dance on the spot for it. My friend asked me if we both can give it a shot. She tempted me soo much that I gave in. But as soon as I got on the stage I felt so afraid seeing a huge audience in front of me. I couldn’t move. Suddenly they started playing the songs and the sound frightened me even more. I was feeling so nervous that I stood rooted to the spot. My friend and I went on stage together. She started dancing and I tried to follow her steps but couldn’t. The audience also started boooing and finally the songs ended and I heaved a sigh of relief. It was the most embarrassing moment in my life till now.

The best culturals was the one at Vidhya Mandhir, Mylapore. We were practicing a fusion dance(classical dance for a western song-Backstreet Boys). But just the day before the dance one of our main members dropped off. She had the cassette but she was on leave on the day of the culturals. The three of us decided to pick some song and try choreographing. Since the event was only in the evening, we thought we will give a try. One of my friends had a Backstreet boys song cassette but it did not have the song for which we had practiced. Still we chose another song(‘That’s the way I like it’-lyrics of the song) and started choreographing. By about 2.30pm we had choreographed for the whole song and we also rehearsed a couple of times. Then, with very little time to spare we reached the school. My mom had come early from office to help us with the costume. Finally we were ready and they called us on stage!! I was a little bit nervous initially as we had practiced for very little time. But once we started dancing I enjoyed myself thoroughly and we had excellent co-ordination(onnu rendu step marandhutom, adhellaam irukardhu dhaana). The highlight was that, we got the third place for the performance when we didn’t expect anything as there were a lot of schools which performed a lot better than us. They told that our formations(with just three people) and our coordination were very good. All three of us were feeling great that day.