The Symbiosis Institute of Design (SID) fest Fundamental 2010 came through after much trial and tribulation but thanks to the persevering Kshitiz, the student co-ordinator, we made many exceptions to our rule!

It was an unusually early flight we took to land in Pune which was to our surprise much colder than Bangalore where we left from! And we were promptly welcomed by 2 guys from SID who looked like they really needed sleep and BAD! That was just the beginning!

We were whisked away to our hotel and all was well till lunch when I decided to head to the college to check the status with the stage and the sound set up. Now the sound vendor was a good chap and he had reasonable equipment but sadly, he had gotten it all wrong! The monitors were phasing all over and for the longest time, Nitin Joshi who made the miracle happen, was seen marshalling the troops and rewiring everything to get it to a sound checkable state!

The sound check it self was quite a challenge and after moving everything around including the PA itself we were finally set to do the show.

The crowd was sitting down like they were ready for class early in the morning but it only took the slightest invitation from Raghu to get them all right up front and almost on stage along with us! From there on, there was nothing really that could go wrong. The energy coming back at us that night was something else and it was pushing us to take the songs to a whole new place!

There was an incident in the middle where our violinist Karthick snapped a string while tuning up for a song and we started hearing chants of “Go Karthick” which upon clarification, we realized that they wanted him to go to the girls hostel! It was a landmark moment and we have to congratulate Karthick for getting the tuning right and continuing to play at the right tempo and not speeding up for obvious reasons! What happened post the gig is beyond the purview of our lovely little blog.

But after all the confusion that ensued in the morning, this was one of the best gigs we’ve played in a while. The energy from the lovely people at SID completely overwhelmed us and to say the least, we’d love to get back there very soon!

A huge thank you to all at SID, especially Kshitiz who went completely out of his way to ensure this happened!

Also for doubling up as an excellent photographer apart from his main role as the miracle worker sound engineer, Nitin Joshi who took these lovely photos of us playing at SID!