A night at IIT Guwahati grooved to Nikhil D'Souza's songs

People slowly began filling up the cricket ground at IIT Guwahati on Sunday evening, August 30. By around 8 pm, the anticipation had settled over the crowd. Then Nikhil D'Souza walked onto the stage, guitar in hand, and the cheers grew louder.
 

He began with Vaaste, asking the crowd to sing along. From there, the evening unfolded one song after another, with the audience joining him in almost every familiar line.
 

At one point, he asked the crowd if they remembered his first song, a song that was particularly special to him because it was his first. People began guessing different names. He gave them a few more hints: it was from the film Aisha.

And then the crowd got it right.
 

Shaam.
 

The moment the song began, the entire crowd seemed to know what to do. People sang along, swayed to the music and let themselves be carried by the familiar melody. There was something nostalgic about watching hundreds of people come together over a song released more than a decade ago.

Then came another moment that stayed with me.
 

Standing towards the front-left of the stage, I could see the moon in its waning gibbous phase. And as Nikhil began singing Mere Bina from Crook, the entire mood of the evening changed.
 

The crowd, which had been dancing and cheering, suddenly became calmer. People hummed along to a song many of us had grown up listening to.
 

I remembered those days in school when songs like Mere Bina would play repeatedly on 9XM. For many of us who grew up in that generation, it became one of those songs that was simply part of growing up, a song associated with a particular time, a particular age and perhaps even our earliest understanding of love.
 

The night, the moon and Nikhil's voice seemed to complement each other perfectly.
 

For the first time, I had the strange feeling of seeing the actual singer of a song standing right in front of me and singing the very song I had listened to countless times while growing up. It was no longer just a voice coming from a television or a pair of headphones. The person behind that voice was right there, singing it live.
 

After that quiet, almost cinematic moment, Nikhil returned to his high-energy numbers. The crowd was back on its feet, dancing and cheering, while his guitarist added a distinct rock edge to the performance. Every time Nikhil reached a high note, the crowd responded with another round of cheers.
 

And somewhere between the music, the lights and the crowd, I found myself thinking about the effort behind an artist's craft.
 

As someone who enjoys music and loves to sing, I wondered how much practice, discipline and emotion it must take for a singer to stand on a stage and carry hundreds of people into the exact mood a song demands — sometimes making them dance, sometimes making them sing, and sometimes making an entire crowd go completely quiet.
 

The lights shifted between red and blue. A bubble machine filled the air, catching the light like tiny stars falling from the sky. For a while, the cricket ground at IIT Guwahati felt less like a campus and more like a little world created entirely by music.
 

And perhaps the most interesting part of the evening was realising how familiar Nikhil D'Souza's voice is to so many of us.
 

Many of us knew the songs — Mere Bina from Crook, Shaam from Aisha, Anjaana Anjaani Ki Kahani from Anjaana Anjaani, O Gujariya from Queen and Har Kisi Ko from Boss, even if we didn't always know the name behind those songs.
 

We knew the music before we knew the man.

And on Sunday night, that voice finally had a face standing before us on the stage at IIT Guwahati.
 

At around 9.30 pm, the concert came to an end. Nikhil said goodbye to IIT Guwahati, while the crowd slowly began to disperse.

But some songs, I suppose, don't really end when the concert does.
 

They stay with you — along with the moon, the memories and the strange happiness of finally hearing, live, the voice you had grown up listening to.