Wonderwall!

As she walked along the backstage corridor, the chants and cheer grew louder and louder and she felt her pulse quickening! It was terrifying to face an audience as huge and electrifying as this. She was young and famous, probably not on the lines of a Madonna or Avril Lavigne but in her own way, she was a star! She had been the voice of some of the latest chartbusters in Bollywood and the crowd loved her versatility. But this was her first stage performance.

She had probably had an audience in hundreds in the past but most of the time she was used to hearing her voice within the premises of the studio or the walls of her home! The audience here was at least a twenty times more and this was her first attempt at capturing the heart of a university crowd that she had once been a part of. She had ten minutes to collect her thoughts, figure out what her opening number should be. A flurry of visuals crossed her imagination as she tried to calm herself down!

Scene 1: Fifteen years ago and she is a starry eyed-teenager, waiting for the band to arrive. Her enthusiasm is limitless as she stands in the front row, frantically searching for him. Every person in the ground was eagerly waiting for the lead singer but she was waiting for who she thought was the love of her life! As he gets on the stage, strikes a guitar chord, winks at her and calls over the mic "this is for someone special", she can feel herself floating away!

Scene 2: It's a perfect holiday and she is sitting on that beach side karaoke cafe, enjoying every sip of that beer and every bit of conversation with three of her closest friends! One of them urges her to go ahead and grab the mic and she responds jokingly, "Not enough beers down my friend!". Two hours later, she is facing a drunk audience, unsure of how she let herself be pursuaded when she hears one of her friends start the lyrics and after that the dias was her stage!

Scene 3: It's her 25th birthday and she has a bunch of friends around her, all of them having one thing in common - they know her! Her guests fail to make conversations among themselves for they are as strange to each other as the person on the next table. She is overcome by emotions as one of her closest friends is moving far far away but she can't let that show. She hates being called weak! But she silently enjoys her scotch and thinks of those years together when the club music suddenly stops and she hears "This one is for the birthday girl" and the last memory that night was of her dancing away to those tunes...

Scene 4: This was just a few weeks ago or may be months... It was a beautiful cozy party, about a dozen people gathered to celebrate the professional success of one of them. Their friendship was at least a decade old. They all remember how different they looked when they had met years before. They had gone through so much together that being with each other was the only way of life they knew! It's almost dawn and they are still reminiscing when someone says, "Hey! Long since you sang just for us!" And this time she needs no persuasion.

She feels all refreshed all of a sudden when someone calls out "You are on in five." There is a sudden flight in her steps as she bounces on to that stage, closes her eyes, hears the bass guitar at the back, and feels herself melting in those lyrics "And after all, you're my Wonderwall!"