Dear Santa, I am a Carol Singer now!
I tried singing with Palash Sen and his band, Euphoria, when they had come to
my college fest. Needless to mention, I was in the audience unable to identify my own voice in the sea of other voices. I had hummed to the tunes (only audible to me though) of ‘Hoshwaalon ko khabar kya’ when I was attending the Gazal Maestro– Jagjit Singh’s concert.
“I had always enjoyed music and had sung numerous Christmas Carols in school every year. But then there were 2000 equally horrifying voices wailing with me.”
Our music teacher had never approved of me in the Choir anyway. So I had effortlessly assumed that I could make a good and supportive audience but not a worthy contributor to music in anyway.
Being the ‘Voice of Youth’ member at my organization, I was presented with the opportunity to be a part of ‘Jingle All the Way’ event, right from its inception to
its execution. I had absolutely no role to play in the idea generation, logistics management or order management for the event. We had some brilliant Idea engineers and executioners in our team to handle all those BIG LOADS. But I heartily contributed to smaller activities which I was actually capable of, like gift packing, arranging the volunteers and …hmmmmm… I guess that will be all. 🙂 I was high on spirits. It was
Christmas time and I could sense it in the air. Plus the event, after all, was for a good social cause, however big or small. It promised to donate all the proceeds from the sales to ‘Samarpan’.
All that was good until the event organizers realized that they were short of carol singers. (Group of colleagues who could actually sing well 😉 )And as luck would have it, I was added to one of the carol singing teams. We were a team of 5 singers and all of us were handed over the red Santa caps for our ‘performance’. The feeling of ‘ME’ singing out loud to the whole bunch of colleagues dawned only when we went to deliver the first “SECRET SANTA” order. I realized that all 5 of us felt awkward while entire floor tracing our movement, following our each step (in anticipation of a Christmas gift or High Jinks is anybody’s guess). We finally found ‘Our Guy’, handed over the gift and started with the very first ‘performance’ – Jingle Bells!
“Our eyes were closed and our hands were shaky as we were trying to reproduce the music that we had heard the other good singers sing”.
And as we transcended to the Chorus of the song with Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells… we experienced a sublime magic within. Unconsciously we, the carol singers, let our voices unite, let our spirits soar and felt our lips curling into big and happy smiles. We opened our eyes to sing our hearts out and were amazed to see the whole floor swaying. Not one, not two, but everyone on the floor was either tapping or hymning or clapping or singing with joy (thank you dear Infoscions for all your support and encouragement). And that moment was definitely our moment of glory… 🙂
We relived the magic with every order that we delivered, with every smile that
we shared and with every clap that we heard. And as I retire after 3 days as Carol singer I am elated to see the happiness that we have shared, the goodwill that we have generated for society and the regained belief in me.
Yes dear Santa … I am a Carol Singer now!!!