Maybe if I hadn’t been in an environment so conducive for learning and exploring, I wouldn’t have met my childhood passion again.
Before I joined college, I had an interest in singing. I knew I had a special voice and I always thought I could live with the one talent that most people wished to have. But after coming to college, I realised that everyone I met was enormously talented with multiple abilities. At first, it was intimidating. However, they weren’t uptight and would never avoid sharing their experiences. This helped me see that I, too, could do all those things.
In terms of music, I was happy to be simply singing songs – old and new alike. But after coming to college, I understood that there is more to a song than its vocalist’s voice.
After I learnt about how music is made in our Audiography lab, I understood overlapping of musical instruments, intonation, and compositions more. I recorded sounds and heard myself sing, and realised how much I would love to be a part of the music industry.
My on stage performances in college were greatly influenced by this new appreciation I had for music, and the way I looked at it was changed completely. I could explain songs better now, to people who hadn’t heard them. While I was content with singing before, the capacity to understand its nuances came to me much later, thanks to SCMC.
Another experience I don’t usually talk about is going back to sketching.
One day, I downloaded Pinterest on my phone and scrolled through the application to understand its interface. Soon, I found a sketch on it which I thought I could make. The very next day, I bought a pencil and an eraser (yes, I was so far removed from art that I didn’t even have its basic amenities), and began drawing. As expected, the people who observed me were shocked, because all throughout college I had maintained that I was artistically handicapped. No one really knew this, but I was a good painter as a child. I had just forgotten with time, and now, my mind was brushing the dust off these skills after all these years.
I bought a sketchbook and started sketching regularly which gave me more satisfaction than anything in the recent past. Maybe if I hadn’t been in an environment so conducive for learning and exploring, I wouldn’t have met my childhood passion again. It is all about the place and the time.
Article by : Vaibhavi Khanwalkar (Batch of 2017)
Photograph by : Panchsheel Gaikwad (Batch of 2019)
