It was a cool and windy evening and we were arranging our instruments and making a fuss about the sound system. A couple of our friends had also come over to help us out. Bouts of humor and friendly sarcasm filled the ambience as we hurried up to meet the timeline set for us to assume the stage. It was all about a funny incident that occurred on one of our previous show.

Everything was ready to rock but the time was ticking away, so we hurriedly performed a short jam session with a intro of my mouth harmonica solo only to find out that we had forgotten to turn on the mixer. There was a short pause in our performance and we busied ourselves with the second checks. The speakers of the restaurant became a major obstacle after we learnt they were not functioning as usual since the last show; that was the day before. If we had known, we arranging our instruments and making a fuss about would have brought our own amplifiers and speakers. Somehow, we managed to fix it and at the end, only one of the speakers seemed to work, which was not enough for the show.

The moment arrived and we were ready to rock the show, ready to start yet another rockilicious night in Thamel; the little town of light. Yes I could feel it in my spines as I turned on the mike. After loads of tiring practice sessions in the band room, there we were and it feels great to be heard live. First carne came Roshan’s lead solo…wait a moment it was not sounding right. Roshan skillfully slid through the guitar fret to play the same solo from a different root note and in a few seconds it was sounding as good as ever. It was my turn then. As usual I took my right hand to its stylish position: the one which I had earned through rigorous practices and down I stuck the strings… what on the earth was that? I thought I did play the right chords. I tried to play what I supposed to but it started to sound even worse. I tried to cope up with the vocals letting my guitar down but it didn’t work either. I then saw that Roshan too was facing the same problem as I did.

Well, after a few embarrassing minutes of off scale music, we had to stop the song and unwillingly hear the eerie silence, which prevailed at the arena even before we had started our show…that silence as we musicians know is the one thing that we believe in… we play with it, we make it disappear for a while and make it come back and forth we even use it and make it audible without any sound coming out of our instruments. Most important of all, we respect it. But here, it was making us look like a bunch of idiots.