By now, you might have guessed (hopefully!!) that this post is gonna be about our initial steps into the world of Mad-Ads... Read on...
Chapter 1:
Irony, Coincidence or Twist of Fate??!
The first time all of us (Troublemakers) were in the same room was during one late September evening in 2006, in a classroom in the mechanical block of PESIT. Auditions were being held for recruiting people into the college mad-ads team. We were eager, wide eyed first years who were absolutely bowled and stumped by the performance of the college mad ads team on Freshers' day.... And when we heard there was going to be an audition, we all wanted a piece of it, we wanted to be a part of the madness.. Badly!! Some of us knew some of us but none of us knew all of us (Hope that made sense!) But we were all there.... with different people but for the same reason - Mad ads! We formed our own groups as we were asked to prepare and perform a Mad-Ad... All of us did.. each of us thought ours was the best and we would win (we still laugh at our feeble attempts whenever we think of them! :P). However, it did not turn out the way we expected it to... None of us were selected... Some of us got good reviews from the guys in the mad-ads team and some of us not so good... We all went back home... disappointed that our dreams of being a part of the college mad ads team came crashing down even before they took flight... dejected that we would never perform on the stage in front of an adulating audience.
And it would have stayed that way hadn't it been for some very unexpected turn of events....
...All of us were in our second semester.....
......... Vinod - the leader of NSS asked Mahesh (a.k.a kothi) who was a member of NSS if he could put together another mad ads team to perform along with the senior mad ads team at Freshers day '07......
To our good fortune, it turned out that Mahesh was the common friend who knew almost all of us... He brought all of us together. Told us about this opportunity. Some of us got excited, some remained skeptical. Did we have it in us to do it? We were all rejected as not good enough for mad ads. So, were we going to humiliate ourselves in front of the audience? We discussed and debated... the pros and the cons... unable to decide... That's when Vinod said "We may humiliate ourselves in front of the audience or if we put in our best, we may come out with our pride intact. But we'd never know which one would happen unless we tried.(This dialogue could be a part of any epic movie.. or is it already?! :)) If you all are really passionate about mad ads and want an opportunity, why do you guys have to think so much when you are getting one?". That pushed us into making the greatest decision of our extra-curricular lives - We were going to perform at Freshers' day 2007.
There we were.... A band of outcasts... most of whom had no acting experience whatsoever... getting ready to perform Mad-ads alongside a great team by which we were all rejected... at an event where we were inspired to take up mad-ads in the first place....
What would you call this??
Irony??! Co-incidence??! Or Twist of Fate???!!
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| @ the adda, a long time ago |
Birth of the applause-bringer:
So far, so good..... Everyone agreed to work together and give it a shot. However, we were not going to start immediately. We had our first semester exams to finish and we all agreed that we would start working on a script for freshers' day when we came back for the second semester after vacations.
The exams came..... and went... some of us did well and some of us...well... I'd rather not talk about it for the fear of evoking painful memories :p
Vacations came and went too. And we finally got together for our first official team meeting... sometime in February 2007. All that we did was to finalize that the narrow gully behind the forging and foundry lab was to be our 'adda' for all meetings henceforth. We did not meet for a month after that due to our first internals ( it was a different matter that we did not start studying until the previous day).
We got together in April to discuss our scripts... We shared all our ideas... That was when we realized that we had nothing!! Every joke that we discussed seemed either dumb or pathetic! We could not come up with a decent product for which we could string together more than 2 good jokes. We decided not to advertise any product.. rather we chose to play for the audience. They were all freshers!! New to the 'Jungle of rules' that was PESIT. We could pull on that string!! And that's exactly what we did.....
We started to work on our first script ever.. Ton-Ton's 3 laws of PESIT... a parody of Newton's 3 laws..
This joke was going to be our first... and we wanted it to make a huge impact... we thought and thought and thought some more... every idea for a high impact script was either too vulgar or unlaughably plain.... so we kept thinking... searching for that elusive idea until one of us came up with the idea of a human-bike formation... not just one which stood still but an actual moving bike!!!! At first we were like WHOA!!!! Awesome idea machi!!!! but then we were like "Maga.. Comedy maadbeda... Bike ella aagalla... Stage maele shape out aaguthe!!" But then finally we all had to give in to the "how will you know if you don't try" concept and decided to try the formation.
The 'bike-formation' scene was special to us.. not only because it was our first or it almost always got us applause from the audience... but also due to the fact that we spent a staggering 3 months working on this single scene... we tried every possible permutation and combination to create a formation which had at least minimum resemblance to a bike and which not only had to seat a rider but also move on stage without falling apart!! Obviously this was not an easy job.. especially when the parts of the bike had a mind of their own and preferred cracking jokes and playing pranks rather than just being a part of the bike.... And to add to this already messed up situation, one of us suggested that we had to make the bike do a wheelie!! WOW!! Just what we needed.. But we were so mesmerized by the idea that we actually incorporated that too... (Now you know why it took us 3 months to work this scene out!)
We kept trying.. different ways of putting people together.. Some formations looked good but could not be held together for more than few seconds without someone's back breaking.... If everyone was comfy, the formation did not even come close to looking like a bike.. One formation looked like a praying mantis with twisted limbs and one looked like a guy trying to balance on two unicycles going in the opposite directions!! After the first month of trying, we had to break for our second semester exams... lets not even talk about it... and then vacations... We tried and tried some more... We even contemplated chucking the formation but somehow we had to come back to this because were lazy to think of something entirely new!!
Finally, one August evening in 2007, one formation looked good... really good... a lot better than any of the previous ones.. it looked like a bike... No one had to break their backs... and it could actually move... without falling apart!!! It was so simple that we were all surprised that we never thought of this before.. With a few modifications, we managed a wheelie!!! :D We were sure that we could pull it off with a little more practice. We looked at our first formation. It was cool, it was awesome, it was our baby.. we knew we would get an applause for at least one thing.. the thing in front of us!!
The applause-bringer was born!!! \m/
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| The bike formation - not the exact original one though... |
Chapter 3:
The christening:
After the euphoria of finally completing the first scene, came the damning realization that we just had less than 2 months to put together rest of the script and also practice for our first performance ever! This scary realization actually helped us speed up the process (relatively speaking) and we managed to complete the rest of the scenes for our 15 minute performance more than a week before the performance (Wow! Can't believe we were so nerdy back then! :p).
That's when we were asked by the senior mad-ads team to show them what we had in store so that they could make sure we didn't do anything that could get us kicked off the stage... This was the first time we performed in front of an audience other than our own... at the end of it, they liked it... they had some advice for us which we took... they were impressed by the bike too... 8)
So, we were ready... But there was one thing left.. we did not have a name for our team yet!! Just when we thought all the discussions and arguments were over, here was another can of worms which popped open... We thought of names... some funny, some inappropriate and some downright hilarious!! There was even a suggestion to name ourselves "Minching Machas" We don't remember who suggested it though!!! :D There were so many names but most of them did not fit because of our criteria "Macha, it should not be just funny da.. Level irbeku!!" ;) This went on till the previous day of our first performance..we had a script but we did not have a name!! How weird was that?! We even thought of naming ourselves 'Nameless' but decided against it.. (we're glad that we did) That's when one of us thought of "Next Big Thing" owing to the fact that we were the junior team. If the senior team was the big thing, naturally that would make us next in line... It wasn't really funny but it appeared to have some 'level' to it... So we decided that we were going to be the "Next Big Thing" unless someone else came up with a far more brilliant name...
..which did not happen and so we settled for NBT - Next Big Thing.....
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| This was the t-shirt design we had in mind for the Next Big Thing! ROTFL! :D |
Chapter 4:
The First Performance:
October 6th, 2007.
The day had arrived. All of us were surprisingly calm. There was no nervousness that in a few hours time, we would be on a stage performing in front of a large audience. For most of us, it was our first experience in any kind of stage acting. Hence, the nervousness was conspicuous by its absence. Not for long however, as the event drew closer, we started feeling really really huge (huge like monstrous, mutated, giant) butterflies in our stomachs, adrenalin was pumping like never before, knees became weak, we felt like we were all going to be sick!
The senior mad ads team had agreed to let us perform before they did as a courtesy to the rookies! We were really grateful as we thought that even if we were horrible, people would soon forget it when they saw the seniors.....
It was time.. The auditorium was packed... full of raucous first years lapping up everything that was on offer.. and booing anything that was not to their taste... that only made us more nervous... The only thought running through all our minds during those moments was "we don't want to get booed"
The previous event drew to a finish... It was time. The MC announced that the junior mad-ads team was going to perform next... There was a smattering of applause... many people probably had never heard of mad-ads before.. just like us.. on our freshers' day..
We slowly made our way up the stage... in our black t-shirts... no two of which looked even remotely similar.. (so much for uniformity!!)... we took our places on either side of the stage.. The narrator started his narration... his voice sounded a little hoarse initially but smoothened off immediately.. suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuiiiiiiiiiiiiiii....... tupukk.... "Anna, Helmet Please!!" was our first dialogue on a stage. The audience chuckled lightly and we did not feel nervous anymore...... The load was off our shoulders.. we felt light.. we knew somehow that the audience was not going to boo us.... Our bike worked like it was supposed to.. and it got the applause as expected. We gave our best for the next 15 minutes. And when it ended, we were in for the surprise of a lifetime. Every person in the audience rose to their feet and applauded our performance. A standing ovation on debut!! That was a first!! This might sound cliched but the feelings we experienced on stage cannot be easily put into words. It was happiness mixed with stunned surprise and immense gratitude for the wonderful crowd which made us feel like rockstars!!
We got off the stage... It was unbelievable! We were all high with the emotion of the moment. We watched the seniors perform amazingly and they got their ovation too... We then rushed out of the audi to celebrate, to bask in the glory, to savor the applause... We shouted, cheered, hooted, hugged, kicked, jumped and danced. We were mad with happiness... We took our first team pic after a performance.. None of us could stop smiling. It was a moment to cherish... dream come true. We hoped with all our hearts that this was a sign of things to come in the future.
When we look back at that performance, we know that it was not one of our best. It was an average performance with a few brilliant scripts, a few amateurishly funny ones and some lame ones too. But what made it special was the occasion and the response.
On Oct 6th, 2007, we were the Kings of the World! (I know that sounds cheesy! But that's exactly how we felt :p)
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| Our first after-performance pic. |
Troublemaker (UB)
In the next blog post..................
Chapter 5 - The struggle and Chapter 6 - The (re)Christening.
