Eight grade, 2010, we were having our very first Cultural Evening in school. There was a great sense of excitement and buzz throughout my batch. Auditions were being held for the various events – dances, songs, plays, and the most sought after of them all, to become one of the eight compėres. I wasn’t very confident back then but I was great with extempore and narrations. After the audition, I was one chosen to be one of the eight compėres from a batch of 250.
Over the next month we practised but I still never felt as confident as I should have.
For the female compėres, the dress code was a dress. Never in my life had I worn a dress. That weekend, I went shopping with my mom to find the perfect dress to a mall near my house. We searched for hours, until we finally found it. It was a red and black from Pantaloons. Clothes weren’t very important to me back then but there was something about that dress that gave the eight grade me the confident that I was missing. On the day of the Cultural Evening, things went wrong with the management of the auditorium that we had rented, which is a story for another day, and we were asked to vacate the building without even finishing half of the show. The entire one month flashed before my eyes, and I looked at myself in that dress and went to the coordinator of the show from my school and convinced her to let us have few of the performances.
I got to go on stage that night wearing my perfect dress. I couldn’t see the audience, for the spotlight made everything dark. That night, I probably gave my best performance. I wasn’t nervous, I was calm, and I was really proud.
That episode gave me the confidence I always lacked, and that dress had a huge part to play in that. Due to all the chaos, we weren’t photographed that day, and we weren’t yet the Instagram and Facebook generation. Yet, the memory of that night and of all those practices stay emended in my mind.
Two years later, I went on to take part in my first ever Model United Nations (MUN) and bought my first set of formals from Van Heusen and Allen Solly (which still fit me, really flattering!). I didn’t prove the world, I was the best MUNner then, but it was a part of all the milestones of my life that have given me confidence, and driven me to always take a step outside of my comfort zone. Last year, I won my first ever ‘High Commendation’ in the MUN held at TAPMI.
@ABGLP