Reflections on my failure to book the Coldplay Mumbai Concert ticket
My neck was itching, my palms were sweaty and I could feel each heartbeat as my adrenalin was pumping. My faithful credit card was screaming in protest about my preference to UPI today and no matter how many bonus points it was offering, I didn’t budge - not today! I wasn’t even this nervous when I checked my CAT results a decade ago and my IIT JEE results more than 1.5 decades ago.
It all started about 2 weeks ago when we were told that Coldplay is coming to India and it’s not just for one but TWO shows. We were ecstatic! We had a chance of redeeming ourselves from the scams that were Diljit’s Dil-lumnati tour and late addition of Green Day to Lollapalooza when all the tickets were already sold out.
I felt sad that all these fancy international artists (including Dua didi) choose Mumbai as their choice of location and I was reminiscent of the time when Iron Maiden, Metallica, GnR, Deep Purple and the likes all came to Bangalore.
I prepped for the moment by listening to old-ass songs of Coldplay like Shiver, In My Place etc over the last week - as if that act alone would earn me the right to tickets as compared to newbies GenZs/Alphas who probably know about Coldplay due to some Insta reel showing their magical looking concerts.
There was a lot of information going around on the probability of one getting a ticket and on the preferred seat selection if you got lucky in his lottery.
The D-Day was here, 22nd September 2024. It reminded me of 13th April 2008 - the worst day of my life.
The clock turned 12 and my mind was about to explode - unfortunately, the talented team at BookMyShow had other ideas, single handedly crashing the hopes of a million or so ticket hopefuls- be it humans (who in that moment behaved like Octopuses multitasking on multiple devices) or bots.
As they were trending on Twitter for 15 mins with every curse word directed towards them, BMS was finally up and running and people got their queue number and engineers like me were brought back the trauma of checking our IIT-JEE ranks with numbers such as 75,302 or 3,54,020. The lords at BMS gave me a rank of 99000 and my wife got a number of 55000 (as usual, she is better than me).
Our hearts sank - would we even get a seat Mining Engineering at IIT Goraguntepalya? (i.e. -the Rs 2500 seat at the corner of the stadium). The queue slowly moved over the next hour or so with our hopes slowly fading away and us resigning to get a seat at a local college (aka “Tribute to Coldplay by Lingaraju and Friends at Bhartiya City Mall”).
The tickets got all sold out at a queue of about 20000. Coldplay/BMS then announced an extended merit list at about 2 PM and we fared even worse in that around.
We were dejected and despondent and all the hope evaporated from the world. We fantasized the green pastures of DY Patil Stadium as if it was IIT Bombay but now we felt as if there were no tomorrow.
That, my friends, was the trauma I went through today - not dis-similar to what I went through about 1.5 decades ago.
On a far serious note though, the insanely high demand for all these artists (And so many more like Bryan Adams, CAS, etc) clearly shows the huge demand for world class arts and music in India where there is huge “India A” (as Blume Ventures or Kishore Biyani would classify them as) class of people. I’m hopeful, in fact I’m sure that more international artists will realize this untapped demand in India for world class music and arts and Indian’s will not need to go to Singapore, Bangkok or even London to get to see their music idols.
The success of NMACC in Mumbai, shows that there is a huge demand for the performance arts in India. Even tier 2 artists get sold out so fast.
This is also the case for Indian artists - although nowhere at the scale I cite above. Diljith is probably the only world class artist we have right now and we would need so many more in the coming future. I visit some gigs, sports, museums and plays regularly and a lot of these artists/athletes need better support from us - better support always leads to a virtuous cycle and improves the quality of everything over time. I remember attending a musical at Soho, London and was blown away but how professional they seemed to be. We’re still a far way away from that par hum honge kamyab ek din!
This is also the case for so many other big ticket items in India - it’s near impossible to get a ticket to an IPL game in Bangalore or some India international cricket game - the supply demand mismatch is already insane and an army of bots and body shoppers add to this extremely lopsided equation.
Also, I feel a little sad at the same time reflecting on the insane supply demand mismatch that leaves you so despondent upon rejection. I know the stakes are very very different here, but you can use this visualize all those reports where you see 90000 people applying for a vacancy of a 100 government jobs. If we feel so bad just by failing to book tickets to some lame-ass concerts, how hard must it be for the millions of young people who can’t seem to catch a break no matter how talented they are.
No matter how many pieces of macro level pieces of news about India’s growth and coming-of-age you may hear, our country is a tough place to live in - be it for something as lame as booking concert tickets or something as critical as a chance to get some livelihood.
Now, as I come back to my present reality, I now must brood over where I went wrong (a faster internet connection? Better mobile phone? Should I be closest to the location where BookMyShow stores it’s servers?), I must get back to my reality of replying to irritable reminder emails from irate vendors and maniacal honking auto drivers trying to compress themselves while zooming past you.
Yehi hai Zindagi
C'est la vie!