After a hard-fought battle for the tickets, the wait finally ended for Coldplay fans, who gathered at the MMRDA grounds BKC, braving mile long lines to watch their favourite band perform live. Among the lucky few are some who managed gold passes nearest to the stage. Further from the stage were the silver, yellow, brown and green zones, with fans almost falling over each other in their eagerness to catch a glimpse of the stage.
For 37-year-old Nishant Agarwal, the journey from Indore to Mumbai was well worth a chance to watch his favourite band perform, as was the whopping '50k he shelled out for the gold zone tickets. “It was now or never for me. I knew that my work wouldn’t allow me to travel out of the country to experience a Coldplay concert abroad. It was difficult for me to fund a ticket in the gold zone but somehow I managed it from my savings,” says an exuberant Nishant, who is one in an estimated number of over 80,000 people who tuned up for the Global Citizen India extravaganza.
While warm-up gigs of AR Rahman and Demi Lovato kept the audience occupied, it was obvious that most people were waiting for the main event-Coldplay. 19-year-old Masob, for instance, came down all the way from Boston for the band with her friends. “We don’t even understand the language or the social cause the organisers are promoting. All we care for is Chris Martin,” he said.
Whether people learned a social lesson or not may be debatable, but if the electric atmosphere was anything to go by, the long wait for the Global Citizen carnival was definitely worth it.
