From the perspective of an over-caffeinated volunteer.
There are two ways to experience Malhar. The first is the perspective of a performer or audience: glamorous, a stage full of lights and music, and several Instagram stories captioned “best weekend ever,” with the Quad as the background of every picture.
The second is the perspective of a volunteer: over-caffeinated and running purely on 3 hours of sleep and adrenaline.
Somewhere between grabbing the god-knows-how-many cups of coffee for the day and running across campus with a walkie-talkie you have no idea how to use, you start noticing the people around you and the wonderful and strange ecosystem of Malhar.
Malhar begins weeks earlier in classrooms with poor Wi-Fi connections and a hundred opinions. It starts with meetings that were supposed to last only 30 minutes, but end up consuming your whole evening. It begins when your OGs or OCs say, “It’ll be chill this year, guys,” and you laugh it off because nobody believes those words anymore.
At first, you are a group of volunteers sitting in a circle, brought together by the department. Everyone feels like a stranger connected only through the department.
“That sponsorship guy.”
“Oh, the girl who writes poetry?”
“Ah, you mean that WPA volunteer?”
“The one who always carries the ladder.”
And then, slowly, people become familiar.
First, there is always that one volunteer who brings extra ice-creams or snacks “for the team”, which actually just means that it's for everybody except themselves. Then, there’s the overly friendly volunteer, who somehow just knows everybody on campus. The security team knows them, participants know them, and even the teachers know them. Just walking from one corridor to another takes twenty minutes because they stop and wave at every second person.
Then comes the volunteer who mysteriously disappears when there’s heavy lifting required, and magically reappears at the sight of food, and asks, “Guys, what can I do?”
And of course, there is that one core member who looks like they’ve been personally betrayed by Google Sheets. Nobody knows when they last slept, or even ate. You start to think that they really are Batman, out there to save the world. They walk around campus carrying three chargers, a walkie-talkie, a water bottle, and the emotional burden of the entire workforce.
But somehow, between these moments, these people stop feeling like teammates and become your people. Entire friendships are formed over chai breaks and a badly painted placard. And before you know it, Malhar begins. The campus is then suddenly filled with new and old faces.
First come the over-prepared participants. They carry huge suitcases and bags filled with costumes and first-aid equipment that would last them a week. They walk around with water bottles, and the stress levels of an entire educational institution.
There are the actors, who, when asked for their name, accidentally squeak “Lady Macbeth!” and burst into an enactment of the character they’re playing. Then there are the dancers. You just know a dancer is around when the floor begins to vibrate slightly. They rehearse everywhere- empty corridors, empty hallways, empty classrooms, and even in places where rehearsing is physically impossible. Somehow, they survive on cold coffee, safety pins, and determination.
Finally, come the teams in their final huddle before going on stage. Ten people squished into a tiny circle, speaking all at once—someone revising the final counts, someone fixing the costumes, and another giving an emotional speech worthy of the climax of a sports movie.
Then there is the last minute participant. This person arrives exactly 30 seconds before registration ends, completely out of breath, holding one shoe in their hand while asking, “Can I participate?” Against all odds, this person somehow manages to win as well.
Inevitably, every volunteer always encounters the lost fresher volunteer. Their ID is upside down. They’ve been sent to “just check one thing” for the sixth time in the last 10 minutes. They hold the file in their hand as if it may explode any minute.
By the third day of Malhar, nobody is entirely sane anymore. You laugh at things that aren’t really funny, and entire conversations happen through eye contact because nobody has the energy to form full sentences. But somehow, everybody shows up.
Someone always shares nachos with you in the middle of a breakdown, someone always notices when you need water, and someone always smiles at you when you’re having a hard time. Maybe that is the strange magic of Malhar. From the outside, it looks like performances, music, and concerts. But from the inside, it is those friendships that are formed because you were stuck in a judge block together; it is those friendships that were formed in the conversations that took place under the shared umbrella in the rain.
Because, at the end of the day, it is not the concert you remember, nor the events, nor the Conclave line-up, but the people you met along the way.