Some things get better with time like wine, while some (rather most) deteriorate or worsen with time like Happenings!

Happenings is the oldest and (was) the biggest college festival in Goa. Happenings is considered to be the grandest of all college festivals. But over the past few years it has lost all its past glory and grandeur.

This year’s Happenings represented a complete messy picture. It lacked everything right from planning and organization to execution. The atmosphere was dull and languorous. The crowd lacked the much needed zest and energy. With hardly any participation from other colleges the happenings ground looked like an empty battlefield. Lack of participation completely thwarted the day events schedule.

I still cannot fathom what went wrong – The organizing team had put in a lot of hard work and efforts to put the event together. They had taken much pain to ensure that the event was successful. But somehow none of the colleges turned up.

Let’s stop cribbing and concentrate on the (few) good things.

The Treasure hunt event scheduled at 11 am started at around 4 pm in the evening. This event brought many light moments. It was a real funny sight to see the participating teams running around the campus searching for the clues. The best part was when they had to do an impromptu dance. Here’s the video of my classmates. Ain’t they looking like doing some weird zombie dance …. Hehe Poor guys ! After so much of hard work, they had to be content with just the consolation prize.

With just 3 colleges, The Battle of Bands could hardly be called as Battle. It was just a mere formality of sort, to decide which college would get the 1st prize.

The only events that managed to get decent crowd were DJ night, and Rock show. For the rock show we had Reverse Polarity and Bhayanak Maut performing live. (click the links to see a snippet of their performance) Reverse Polarity were pretty good. The crowd whistled, cheered and enjoyed their performance. The music was loud, the lyrics completely crazy and the lead singer literally shouting and screaming at the highest level possible and the crowd happy and the more enthusiastic ones head banging. It was unlike the Indian Ocean concert at Waves 09, where the music was a fusion of rock, Sufism, shlokas etc, which didn’t go much well with the audience. Bhayanak maut were a bit disappointing. I had more expectations from it, as it’s a more established band . I hadn’t heard of Reverse Polarity before, but I had heard a lot about Bhayanak Maut. I guess we weren’t lucky enough to witness their best performance. May be they were thinking that loud English music, drums and bass guitar were enough for a performing in front of college crowd. That’s even true to some extent. Most of the people are comfortably numb to rock. They’re present because there’s a rock show in college and its considered cool to attend it. There are many who would have just one question on their mind “ are hindi gaana Kab bajega?” But that doesn’t serve as an excuse for taking everyone granted and underperformance.

Thus came to an end The NOT SO HAPPNING, HAPPNINGS 09.

Let’s hope that history doesn’t repeat itself next year and Happenings regains all its lost glory and glamour. I hope to witness the last happenings of my college life in all its grandeur and splendor.