The 'Queue'rious Incident of the Music-Lovers in the Night Time

I hate queues. I especially resent the way their tortuously slow pace perversely coincides with me being in a tearing hurry. I hate the effect they have on me- the welling frustration, the rising blood pressure (almost as bad as when I have my regular bouts of road rage), the mounting tension. But I hate them the most when they lead nowhere, and by these standards, Friday’s line outside the NCPA leaves the rest of the field far behind (GLC fee-paying days included) when it comes to picking the most sadistic queue of them all.

The upcoming Mehli Mehta Foundation concerts have been garnering a lot of print space- they’re about the only events on the Western Classical Music scene in Mumbai which could ever attract any media attention. The only time I’ve read a piece on Sangat, Mumbai’s annual chamber music ‘festival’, they’d got the spelling and date wrong (the latter by a few odd months). And while I would ordinarily have been thrilled at all the publicity being generated, I’d have given anything on Friday for no one to have heard of Zubin Mehta or Daniel Barenboim or Pinchas Zukerman. Hell, I wouldn’t have cared even if people thought that chamber music was something weird that counsels listened to in a closet.

Obviously, I haven’t got tickets to hear only some of the greatest musicians ever. And consequently, I’m more shocked than delighted that people in Mumbai care enough about music to queue up outside the NCPA (or rather, send their drivers and peons to queue up…) from 3:00 a.m. the preceding night when the box office was supposed to open officially only at 10:00. Naturally, I didn’t stand a chance in hell when I landed up only an hour before the opening. (Token No: 277!!) But I’m beginning to have doubts about this new-found enthusiasm. I caught some very dubious snatches of conversation while I was sweating it out in the queue. There were several murmurs about how one couldn’t pass up the chance to see such ‘celebrities’, the underlying sentiment being that these concerts were the place to be seen if you wanted to make a mark on Mumbai’s social circuit. And I distinctly heard one lady say that she thought ‘chamber music was too classical (whatever that means) for her liking’ and that there were times when she positively disliked the sound of the violin, if you please!! What on earth was she doing there then??? Actually, the answer’s pretty obvious- she was going to snap up as many tickets as she could (they were rationing 2 tickets per person per show) and then sell some of them off for as much as she could milk the genuine music-lovers for. Apparently, some of the night-long vigil people weren’t actuated by a profound love of Mozart or Beethoven either. There were very credible rumours doing the rounds that the token numbers were going for a song the next day on the black market.

Needless to say, I am very, very disappointed that I haven’t managed to lay my hands on even one ticket. Of course, I’ll be staking out the Jamshed Bhabha theatre on the concert evenings in the hope that some other violin-hater like my queue lady will be looking to offload a ticket. In the meantime, anyone with suggestions on how to procure one will earn my undying gratitude and unwavering devotion!