India is set to get jazzed up once again as Teamwork Arts, a leading force in India’s performing arts ecosystem, announces the 9th edition of the Jazz India Circuit, scheduled to tour Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Delhi from 4th to 8th February 2026.

A flagship platform for contemporary and cutting-edge jazz, the Jazz India Circuit 2026 brings together world-renowned international artists and boundary-pushing collaborations, reaffirming its position as one of India’s most exciting live music properties.

A Power-Packed Line-Up for 2026

Standing in a crowd, surrounded by thousands of strangers who all seemed far more prepared for this moment than I was. Waiting for Coldplay to walk on stage and give me an evening to remember forever - either as a high point experience wise or a moment I would remember as lesson to never overestimate myself. I remember thinking, briefly, that I could still leave. That I could turn this into another almost-story.

I didn’t leave.

Mumbai, the crowd, and the part of me that wanted to flee

The truth is, I wasn’t scared of missing out on the concert. I was extremely scared of experiencing it. The crowd. The noise. The lights. The sheer scale of it all. Every possible trigger for sensory overload packed neatly into one evening. This is usually the point where I tell myself I’m “not built for these things” and retreat into safer, quieter pleasures. Headphones. Controlled volume. Familiar rooms. Predictable exits.

I had trained for this for months. Even before Coldplay ever announced their India dates, I was convinced they would come and that I needed to be prepared for it. And when I say I trained for months, I actually trained myself for the sensory overload that a concert could be in the best way I knew how. I started by taking public transport again. First during low rush periods with headphones on. First, sitting at the back of the auto where you are forced to close quarters with strangers and sit touching each other. Then to public buses and metros where it was more than two people at a time. Then slowly moving onto rush hours - still with headphones on (same song on repeat to have something to ground me). And then slowly travelling in public transportation during rush hours without headphones for short journeys, that became longer and longer.

Most of you reading this, will probably be wondering that these are all everyday common things that people do on a daily basis. Why would I consider this as ‘training for a concert’. Well, I have always been hypersensitive to stimuli. Exposure to bright lights (or the sun) for an hour or so is enough to give me a freaking headache that won’t go away for the rest of the day. Same for loud noises or crowds. Putting all 3 together is a disaster for me. And my nervous system had been at it’s worst back in 2020-21. So, it had been a uphill task.

I kept waiting for my threshold to snap. For the lights to become too sharp, the bass too heavy, the crowd too close. I kept bracing for the moment when enjoyment would tip into overwhelm and I’d have to negotiate with myself to stay. That moment didn’t arrive the way I expected it to.

When Coldplay finally came on stage, the crowd went mad, and something in me did the opposite of panic. My brain, usually so eager to narrate every experience into submission, went quiet. The noise stopped being noise. It became atmosphere. The lights stopped being intrusive. They became part of the story unfolding around me.

That surprised me more than anything else that night.

Maybe it was the music. I didn’t stop being sensitive. I stopped being afraid of my sensitivity.

And for someone who has spent years managing input like a negotiation in old Delhi bazaar, that felt like a small miracle disguised as a concert.

In the crowd, I realized I already knew these songs with my body. A song from a phase when I was hopeful. Another from a phase when I was just trying to get through the day. A chorus that once meant comfort, now sounding like reassurance. People say that is art. For me, only music has a way of doing that.

When the first familiar notes hit, it wasn’t excitement that took over. It was a quiet feeling of ‘I am okay.’ That might be what surprised me most. Not the scale. Not the spectacle. But how safe it felt to be small inside something so large. To let the music carry the weight instead of me having to hold it all together. Trust that I wouldn’t lose myself if I let go just a little.

The moment it stopped being theoretical

I had prepared for everything I could name. The crowd. The lights. The noise. The exits. I had rehearsed coping strategies like a responsible adult who knows their limits. What I hadn’t prepared for was the way the music would arrive through my body.

I had standing tickets. Which meant there was no polite distance between me and the sound. No buffer. No chair to anchor myself to. When the beat dropped, I didn’t just hear it. I felt it. Under my feet first. A steady, physical vibration traveling up through the ground, through my legs, into my chest. 

That was the moment the fear loosened its grip. I feel that one feeling is still very impossible to intellectualize or express. 

The music wasn’t something happening to me. It was something happening with me. Around me. Beneath me. I wasn’t overstimulated. I felt connected to it. The same sensitivity I had been bracing against was suddenly doing something else entirely. It was receiving.

And then they performed Viva La Vida.

I don’t know how close I was to the stage in measurable terms. Close enough that I felt I could probably reach out and touch the band members. The song stopped being a memory and became a shared pulse. The crowd surged, the lights flared, and thousands of voices rose at once, singing about fallen kings and borrowed power and the strange humility of survival.

I didn’t think about meaning. I just stood there, vibrating along with the ground, letting the song exist without interpretation. There was something so grounding about that. Feeling small without feeling erased. Feeling part of something without having to perform belonging.

And for a first concert, that felt like enough.

After the Lights, After the Noise

The concert didn’t end the way stories like to end. There was no freeze-frame moment, no neat emotional crescendo that carried me home on a high. It ended the way real things end. Slowly. With people drifting away, voices hoarse, bodies tired, adrenaline leaking out in uneven waves.

Mumbai was still Mumbai when we stepped back into it. Traffic resumed its arguments. Vendors kept shouting. Life refused to pause to acknowledge that something extraordinary had just happened to me. I liked that. There was comfort in the normalcy of it. As if the city was saying, you felt something big, good for you, now come back and live.

What surprised me was how my body remembered the night long after the sound had faded. The vibration didn’t vanish immediately. Even a year later, I can still feel it in my heart and in my feet. 

I walked away knowing this wasn’t just about a band or a song or even a first concert checked off a list. It was proof that sometimes the thing you’re most afraid of teaches your nervous system a new language.

In December, I wrote about how rest feels illegal. How the world keeps telling us that productivity is like a moral obligation and exhaustion is like a badge of honor. How doing nothing feels like disobedience. How slowing down feels like slipping off the map. That post came from a place of very tired and quiet rebellion.

But rebellion, I’m learning, has seasons.

For the first time in my life (a first in four decades) I took seven days off from work. Not because I had a trip planned or because I had work that needed handled. It wasn’t because of any other reason, but to practice what I was preaching… To rest. I have been feeling it in my body and my mind - they were starting to rebel and telling me that they needed rest. And so, I took days off with other plan than to sleep. 

The first three days I was ‘productive’ because I managed to clean and re-organise my bookshelves and make space for more. I had been putting that off for a while even though books were starting to pile up everywhere (including my closet that is meant for my clothes) because it takes a lot of time. Once that was done, I did what I promised myself… eat (I don’t have to prep or cook), sleep and stare at the ceiling - letting my mind go blank.

You can only rest for so long before something inside you begins to stir. Not with urgency. Not with hunger. More like a low hum. A reminder that you are still in motion, even when you are still. That breath doesn’t stop just because you stopped performing. That the heart doesn’t wait for permission to keep beating.

That hum is where 2026 begins for me.

My word for the year is Momentum.

Not the loud kind. Not the startup-bro, grind-culture, “rise and conquer” version of it. Not the kind that burns fast and collapses faster. I mean the quieter kind. The kind that builds without spectacle. The kind that reveals itself in tiny shifts. A sentence written. A thought held gently. A boundary kept. A song felt all the way through without rushing to the next one.

Momentum, as I want it this year, is not about how fast I move. It’s about whether I’m still moving at all.

After learning how to rest without guilt, I don’t want to swing violently into ambition again. I don’t want whiplash disguised as motivation. I don’t want another season of “I should be doing more” echoing in my head like unpaid rent. This year, I want continuity. I want the soft discipline of showing up without spectacle. I want the kind of forward motion that doesn’t require me to abandon myself at the starting line.

Momentum feels like choosing life in increments.

Some days, it might be just getting up and showing up at my work desk. Or it could be just writing a page about all my random thoughts. Other days, not quitting. Some days, it might look like finally letting a thought reach its end. Other days, simply letting a feeling pass without naming it a personal failing. Momentum, for me, only asks that I participate in my own becoming.

And maybe that’s enough for a year.

What Momentum Looks Like

Momentum, in my world, is not a dramatic reinvention montage. There is no triumphant background score swelling as I finally “get my life together,” even though I might play ‘Never Mind’ on repeat. This is is the part where I learn how to keep walking where others stop.

Some days, momentum will look boring.

It will look like opening a half-finished draft instead of abandoning it for a shinier new idea. It will look like replying to the difficult message instead of mentally rehearsing it for three days. It will look like choosing the slower road even when the faster one keeps whispering threats about being left behind.

It will look like showing up imperfectly and refusing to make a tragedy out of it.

Momentum will also look wildly inconsistent. There will be days when I move with conviction and days when I crawl with doubt. Both count. This year, I am no longer interested in only validating the versions of myself that arrive with confidence and clarity. Hesitation is also motion. Uncertainty is not stagnation. Pauses are not failure. They are part of the rhythm, whether I like it or not.

Somewhere along the way, we learned to confuse momentum with intensity. As if forward movement has to hurt to be real. As if ease is a lie we haven’t earned. I don’t believe that anymore. I think momentum can be gentle. I think it can feel like steadiness instead of struggle. Like water that doesn’t crash but still reshapes stone over time.

This is the year I stop waiting for the perfect emotional weather to begin again.

This is the year I move even when I am unsure. Especially when I am unsure.

Momentum, But Make It Mine

For me, shows up in my journal first. It always does. Journaling is where I measure aliveness most honestly. Last year taught me how to stop. This year is teaching me how to begin again without violence. Not the intoxicating kind of beginning where you promise yourself a new personality and a better schedule. The quieter kind, where you return to unfinished entries (or blogposts) and don’t treat them like evidence of failure. Where you write badly on purpose just to keep the current running. Where you trust that form will come later, but motion has to come first.

It also shows up in how I sit with symbols. As some of you know, Tarot has never been about prediction for me. It’s been a language for the things I struggle to say out loud. Last year, I pulled slower cards. Pause cards. And I admit that it made me feel bad at first, because I had bought into the world’s version of momentum. This year, I notice more movement in the spreads. Pages walking. Knights charging. Even Death, doing what it does best. Change doesn’t ask for permission, it just keeps happening. Momentum is realizing that I don’t have to chase transformation. I only have to stop resisting the current I’m already standing in.

And then there’s the emotional terrain. The part one can rarely map in clean lines.

Momentum, emotionally, means I don’t stay stuck just because I recognize the pattern. Familiar pain is still pain. Familiar fear is still fear. This year, I want to stop nesting inside what I know just because it’s predictable. I want to move even when the next feeling doesn’t come with subtitles.

I hope that it will not be like reopening old doors just to check if the hurt is still alive inside them. I hope it will look like choosing steadiness over emotional whiplash. That it will look like learning how to stay with myself when distraction is easier. I HOPE that it will mean letting music move through me without turning it into escape. Letting stories mirror me without consuming me. Letting longing exist without immediately demanding a story arc where it gets resolved.

What I Hope 2026 Will Be

What I want from 2026 is not a dramatic leap. I hope it to be a year that grows through accumulation. A year where small steps don’t feel insignificant, because they’re part of a longer arc. A year where my goals don’t sit on separate islands but feel woven into my everyday routines. A year where discipline isn’t punishment, and rest isn’t guilt.

Momentum that lets me move in that direction.

It connects my dreams to my actions.

It supports both ambition and gentleness.

It reminds me that growth often happens in the follow-through, not the beginning.

And that’s why it’s my word for the year ahead. Wish me luck!