Anicca

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

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.