It's not always that you can think back to the year gone by and remember to the day, to the minute, exactly what you were doing.
I was doing antibiotics. And Contramol.
It had been about three weeks in Jaisalmer. We'd been waiting for the Ragasthan team to arrive. Meanwhile, we were done with the touristy thing already. We'd been all over the Golden Fort. We knew where to park for free, which alleys to duck into when eager guides and shopkeepers chased after you. Not that they did any more.
We were creating reviews and content for the Ragasthan social media, guidebooks and whatnot. In the process, we were having each meal at a different place almost every day for three weeks. One of them had sent my stomach to hell and I'd locked myself in the loo to exorcise the demon for two days. That was this day, this minute, last year.
Beer. Takes you back in time faster than a DeLorean.
A day after that, Ragasthan Unit One arrives. And then things get hazy.
It's like I stepped on a carousel and it went so hard, so fast and for so long that now that I've stepped off, all I can remember is a barrage of music, colours, lights and shapes. It's all mixed together in a giant, euphoric smoothie of a memory.
That's what makes this a little difficult.
A couple of days back, a post showed up on the Ragasthan Facebook page that looked oddly familiar. As it should. It’s the first entry from this blog. They’re hosting the blog on their page one post at a time as a run-up to the next edition.
Correction: That was less eagle and more Black Hawk
This is a bit of a worry. Because this blog is not complete. Two days before the festival, our walkie-talkies switched on at the site and the blog switched to total radio silence. What happened in the days to come would fill this blog once over. There was just no way and no time to put it down.
And after it was all done, there was no reason to either. The blog wasn’t a marketing vehicle. There was no audience we were writing for. If we stopped, there was no one we’d disappoint. We’d only started because we thought there was a story to tell.
Which is why, now that Batman is taking this skeleton out of the closet for spring cleaning, it seems rather unfair that the blog stopped just before the story really got started.
Before the devilish design of the festival site had driven us all to tears, before that first disastrous day when Murphy’s Law made us its bitch, before the intruders, before the scorpions, before that magical sunrise over Ammara, before the power went out for two hours at sunset over a two square kilometre festival site in the middle of a desert with no other source of light for miles.
There’s a story there, and then some. And just for that, it deserves to be told.
So. I'm Back.
