"I wish there were a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them." — Andy Bernard, The Office
The life of a Malhar volunteer is neatly divided into pre-Malhar, Malhar, and post-Malhar. It sounds structured and comforting even to know that there is a beginning, middle, and end.
Pre-Malhar is full of chaos, meetings, inside jokes, and plans that change a hundred times before they settle. You complain about exhaustion and the pressure, but you secretly look forward to it every waking hour. People who were once just names on the list become the ones you look for in every room. Awkward conversations that started with work slowly drift to talking about your childhood stories. You begin to belong, without even realising when it all changed.
And then Malhar arrives. The Day. Somewhere between the chaos, you find a rhythm—between you and your fellow teammates. There’s a pulse to everything—the footsteps, the chants, and the music. Your body is exhausted, your mind is racing, and yet you’ve never felt more alive. Your superiors prepare you for the worst-case scenarios before and even during Malhar. You think that you are up for the challenge and are prepared for anything that comes your way.
But do you know what they really don’t prepare you for? How fleeting all of this really is.
As Malhar ends, the inevitable catches up to you. You desperately hold on to the moments, hoping this never ends, and no matter how tightly you try to hold on, it continues to do what it always did best—slip through your fingers. Those 3 days of Malhar may be the hardest—living on 4-5 hours of sleep, having just caffeine for meals—but you desperately hope to hold on to the moments. You, for once, hope that you were Dr. Strange and could pause time, right then and there. You wish to stay in the middle of the chaos and the laughter forever.
Because these corridors? They aren’t just corridors; they are the places where we got stuck in a judge block. The little forgotten space under the Hogwarts stairs? That’s the LA lounge workspace. The 20s are the Lounges, and the place above the Hall is where FA breathed, lived, and created the world of Malhar. And the Bonnet Lab is where FnD birthed the Aftermovie.
Post-Malhar isn’t loud. It doesn’t announce itself. It arrives silently in the absence of something you didn’t realise had become your constant. You find yourself going back to those corridors, the space under the Hogwarts stairs, the 20s, and the place above the Hall. You stand there a little longer than necessary, almost expecting someone to assign you a duty. But somewhere in the distance, you hear the classroom doors shutting and the noise of posters being taken down. The stages are empty now, the lights are off, and the places that felt too small for all the energy seem unbearably large.
No one tells you when Malhar ends for you. Maybe it’s when you stand in the Quad after the Aftermovie played on the screen, crying in each other’s arms, or the moment you go home and remove your workforce t-shirts, or it’s when you wake up the next morning, realising that nobody needs you to urgently attend a meeting.
You remember the smallest things.
The 3 a.m. conversations.
The frantic running through the corridors because an event was about to begin.
The laughter that came at the worst possible moments.
Perhaps, at the end of the day, that is what Malhar becomes—not the events, not the Conclave lineup, not the concert, but the people themselves.
The people who saw the different versions of you—the anxious version, the angry version, and the sleep-deprived version. Somewhere along the way, with the lounge work and the midnight calls, the people you met every day became routine. And routines became attachments.
Maybe that is why post-Malhar hurts the way it does: how do you return to ordinary life after experiencing something magical for three whole days? How do you walk through those corridors without hearing echoes of laughter, announcements, and hurried footsteps?
Because somewhere along the way, Malhar quietly became home.
Malhar is over now. The t-shirts will come off, the space under the Hogwarts stairs will be empty, the Hall will go back to being quiet, and the foyer will be empty of the DnM and Cardolates stalls.
But somewhere between all these spaces, in the echoes of footsteps and laughter and sleepless nights, pieces of us will remain.
So here’s to pre-Malhar, where strangers became teammates.
To Malhar, where teammates became family.
And to post-Malhar, where we learn that some beautiful things are beautiful precisely because they slip through our fingers.