WOW - Partly yo, partly no.

If you asked me to sum the night up in a single phrase, I’d have to say it was “Legendarily Acrobatic.” The attractions of the event, the Cardiff WOW festival, were definitely the partly aerobic, partly dance-ical performance that the artists had put up, all stacked together at a breathtaking 50 feet in the air. Not to forget the, what I would call it, amazingly sinful rock performance by a local band filling the background.
The Cardiff WOW festival, which surprisingly had elicited a massive turnout, was what we thought predominantly a Spanish event. I say Spanish because all that we could hear apart from a loud buzz around us, while people were desperately hunting for a place to sit that allowed them a clear view of the happenings of the event, were peppy Salsa tracks taken from a presumably mixed tape of Spanish groove musical hit. It was a quite soothing to be out with friends, after a long time, and be a part of a cultural event.
Colours seemed to be dancing all around the place, the music was adding just the appropriate amount of peppiness to the overwhelming crowd, and a Spanish couple doing a bit of their hip-shaking Salsa piece (with the woman dressed up in a striking pink skirt with its perils floating around to the thumping beats choreographed by her butt) just before the commencement of the event was a delightful watch.
And of course, there was always the stereotypical Indianness sprinkled over – four to five guys lurking around with hands in their pockets. To some people that would sound normal, and as you would imagine, people with hands in their pockets are not oddballs. But, as uncomfortable as they looked, with their butts begging to tear apart the jeans and stick out, and the way we, or atleast I, could see the inescapable outlines of their fingers (which were by the way, inside their pockets) did nothing but accentuate the tightness of the outfit. You may think I sound gay to be describing guys in that manner, but well, spotting Indianness in a crowd full of multicultural people, and ensuing it with a heavy dose of laughter is what Indians are good at.
The evening kicked off at what seemed to be Judgment Day, owing to the ludicrous delay the organizers had subjected the event to. Once it did, the performers made it look like one of the worst events I had been to. The first half of the event was dominated majorly by a narrator screaming a mythological story over his microphone in, what one of my friends called it as, a constipated tone. To add to the boredom, some of which was actually because of the unclear view that we, as back-standers, could buy for ourselves.
The foreground was casted in a badly choreographed play, and the credits included dragons walking around the stage in all possible directions, and the rest of the crew that wore body clinging tees and tights having a Halloween makeup on their faces. The makeup, however, served the purpose if it was meant to highlight the ugliness of the people – not in the Halloweenish way, but of a more “regiment of a Gothic King” way. The consistent mythological rambling went on for an hour, before it gave way to the awesome part of the night.
By this time the night had fallen, and the lights were up. A rock band took its place on the stage (something that is quite quintessential if you’re going to a cultural event). The difference being, firstly that it wasn’t an all-male rock band where the vocalist tries to create new versions of his hoarseness; secondly, where the desperate guitarists and drummers, to prove their individual presence in the band, start playing off in insanely different tangents, marked by constant jumping or unreasonable head-banging.
Along with the music, was the most awe-inspiring piece of acrobats performed by a bunch of eight people. The prop included a spherical cage, with a large opening at the bottom, suspended by a crane. Performers got inside, and before they were lifted up to an unbelievable height of 50 feet, they had elicited enough jaw-dropping reactions.
High above, the performers formed two lines of four, with the top most hanging on to the sink of the cage, and everyone that followed holding on to the predecessor’s feet. Within a minute, the lines had transformed into a double helix. To add to the amazement, the cage began spinning, to demonstrate what some biologists would say, the exact functioning of the DNA. The second heart racing sight was when one of the persons stood in the middle of the cage, while the rest formed a circle on the circumference, jumped down, letting himself a free fall. Of course the strap he was tied to from his waist to the cage did not let him experience a crash on the earth, but his jump in itself gave the crowd a figurative heart attack.
Another staggering inclusion was the impeccable coordination of the choreography with the music that ran 50 feet below, on the surface of the earth. The current of sentiments flowing through with the music was in complete resonance with the happenings in space. For all “Mother Earth” lovers, the night couldn’t have been better.
The band that ran its composition in the background was five piece, with the female as the vocalist, while the instruments were played by guys. It’s an ensemble most of the established bands have adopted – predominantly Gothic bands like Evanescence, Within Temptation and Lacuna Coil and the partial emo, partial punk Paramore.
The music coming out of the band was one of the most coordinated live performances I have ever heard. The riffs weren’t anything remotely close to the earth-shattering rock that you normally expect at any event, but something that I would call as a “progressively soulful rock.” The first two tracks were an inspiration from Within Temptation’s “Mother Earth”, with the vocalist reciting hymns and crying out loud for liberation and deliverance, rather than crashing her guitars over her ex boyfriend. It seemed to be like a perfect extract from a movie that kept Apocalypse or Armageddon as their central theme.
The next track advanced from a serene and soulful form of rock (not to be confused with soft rock) into a stronger version. This is where notes of Rise Against kicked in, with the coordinated set of four moving together to produce a beautiful collaboration and chaos and jeopardy (if you’re a Rise Against fan, you’ll know chaos implies “beauty”).
And the last performance was more or less a combination of these two versions. The vocalist came back in, this time her voice stronger than before, and the background score thumping with a louder impact.
The night ended with a powerful shower of firecrackers shooting in the air. Colours of purple, yellow, golden, green and red sparkled all over the sky – some that looked like a tracer-bullet launching itself into the night sky, some that exploded from a tiny dot and spread out its glitter in all directions around, while the rest whirled around until it gave birth to a small peck of white light and crackling sound.

AMBIGRAM-matically awesome!

They say art comes in all sorts of styles and sizes. And it stems from some of the most unexpected platforms. Well, it surely did for me.

I didn’t paint the town red, or use the vibrant palettes of blues, greens and reds and celebrate a jubilatory occasion of colours, or create a life sized portrait of a washed up singer selling his record labels in infamous sex stores. The theme for the last couple of days, which by the way had been filled with an overwhelming dose of expressiveness and articulation, were ambigrams.

Yes, don’t get astonished if you haven’t heard of this term before. There’s a reason why the word ambigram is zigzagged with a red underline when you type it on your MS Word software.

Ambigram, technically, is any word, that spells exactly the same if you turn the page upside down and give it a read. So, when I say that I actually crafted an ambigram out of my own name, being Shaurya, it certainly requires a lethally artistic mental organisation. Because clearly, if you write Shaurya down on a piece of paper, turn the paper and give it a read, it, for sure, will not read the same. It won’t even read english, will it?

So yeah, that’s how the challenge of drawing an ambigram from my name came about. To break the ambigram into individual alphabets, this meant that the letter S should’ve been designed in a way that reads A upside down. And the same goes for H, which should’ve read Y, A which should’ve read R.

U, positioned right in the centre of the name had to be catered meticulously, of course. Considering there needs to be a design that would make the seemingly impossible possible and stand out to make U seem like U when turned upside down.

But well, through straight lines and curves, spinning sketches that interlaced through the arcs and other lines, I managed to come up with the first version of the ambigram. It looked relatively modern and something that a an amateur program built by a second year software engineering student could’ve made on his personal computer, without any calligraphic touches or significant hints or abstract artistry involved.

The next day, as amazed as I already was at my own skill of crafting this unique blend of architecture and art, me and my friend got down to modify of the previous piece of work. From being a mere skeleton of lines and curves, we flocked from the highly modern and mechanical way of creating ambigrams to a relative ancient and calligraphic type. This is where my friend, ironically the only friend I’ve had around who participated in my type of art, exuded her craft.

We played around with the alphabets a bit, altering and modifying the things that seemed way too obvious to the naked eye. So we altered the H, which was initially in its uncapped form, and replaced it’s the standing line that followed a curve at the top to make it the base of the uncapped Y when you turn it around, with a capped H with the left arm extended to be the very same arc that provided the base of an uncapped Y. The rest remained the same more or less.

What was amazingly astounding about the entire adventure was how endurably, we sat through 3 (could’ve been 4) hours, sketching and resketching, modelling and remodelling, deciding on the colour schemes, putting angelic and demonic representative markers on top of our names (with the inspiration coming from Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, which I labelled as BOSS), discussing how we would’ve aced had we worked this hard towards our respective professional fields, and then celebrating in that moment of glory after we crossed the threshold of giving it that final design.

Choosing the colours was another arduous task. Since the theme was angels and demons, and there were two names, it didn’t take much before my friend came out with the idea of referring to our names as angels and demons – and since the idea sprout from her side, she was the angel and I had to be demon. To be honest, being a demon doesn’t demean my integrity, considering I got to have my name coloured in black and red. You have to be an artist to fully understand the awesomeness of black’s union with red.

And hers angel wings were, after going from dark green and light green (which was the original combination in the designing phase), purples, pinks and magentas, were narrowed down to dark purple and pink, and light purple and magenta. Since, to me, purple has always exuberated something that deserves a stronger hold as opposed to any colour except black, we gave her the dark purple wings.


All this, was with Linkin Park (Reanimation) running in the background. The music is experimental in its own terms without a doubt, thus, inspiring, at least me to spin innovation through my creative wand.

The best part, after the entire intricate designing and giving it a colourful lustre, was the calligraphic touch my friend gave to the entire scene. I don’t know where she learnt that from, but I am going to hone myself in that art. The pair of ambigrams, all of a sudden, seemed like an extraction from a mid-medieval stone, where a group of native Indians might have scripted down the symbolic ancient numeric system.

The result isn’t obvious to the naked eye (therefore, the other name, if you cant make out, is Vedika), and if you aren’t a Dan Brown fan, there is a fat chance you may not want to bother over the incredibility that it displays, but to the ones that do understand art, here’s what we finally came up with…