A palpable sense of excitement and energy pulsed through the air at ‘Tal Se Tal’, a percussion-based music event organised by the Samagra, the theatre society of Maharaja Agrasen Institute of Management Studies (MAIMS) at Rohini on Tuesday. Headed by Deepanshu Chauhan (20), a final year student pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism and Mass Communication, this was the first offline event organised by Samagra since the onset of the pandemic.
“We perform in competitions for stage events and stage plays. But with COVID-19, everything started happening online. So we wanted to come up with a new event, different from nukkad-natak and stage plays. That is how we came up with a music event. We started out with the idea of a percussion event with tablas and drums, but eventually added more instruments to make it more reachable to people,” he shared.
Talking about why the event was themed around percussion, he mentioned, “When we perform street plays, percussion is an important part of it. Guitars and other instruments only function as fillers, but percussion is our main instrument. It’s not just for us, but for the entire theatre circuit. So we thought, why not percussion? There were no percussion-specific events happening in the city.”
Twenty three performers, both from MAIMS and other colleges in Delhi, as well as four guest performances, took to the stage to delight the audience around them, most of whom were clapping and singing along. “We had more sign-ups; they backed out at the final moment. Delhi University has exams today, and our event was announced before their date sheet came out,” Chauhan said.
Having a blast
Prabhleen Kaur (19), a first-year student at MAIMS, said, “All the performances were great. The third-year students performed a medley just now, which was very nice.” A mashup of four Bollywood songs with one song leading seamlessly into another, this medley was appreciated by the spectators.
Utsav Sharma (21), a final year student who was the lead singer for Samagra in 2019, spoke about the event bringing people together post-COVID. “It doesn’t matter what kind of performances we saw. What matters is that everyone was involved and everyone participated. We loved the enthusiasm that everyone showed here,” he said. Kaur added, “After COVID, we have understood the value of offline events. We didn’t get to attend these events for a year and a half…that’s why the enthusiasm was more in everyone!” “I think it was a successful event. We had an offline event after a long time, so it was a lot of fun,” Chauhan concluded as the evening wound down with the audience crooning the lines of Tere Jaisa Yaar Kahan.