Lost and found in Belgium’s Rock Werchter concert

In the week gone by, I found myself at a small village outside Brussels called Werchter. There were sheep. There were cows. And fields and rustic European homes. But it turns out that they had quite a monstrous rat problem because every year, they invite a horde of extremely loud, ultra-amplified pied pipers (rock musicians) to a large field in town to presumably blow the tympanic membranes of the aforementioned rodents, and the 80,000-odd humans who gather to listen to them.

The organisers also provide free train and bus travel within Belgium to get to the place. While that may sound quite generous, one must realise that a stone’s throw in Belgium lands in a neighbouring country. We reached there in the afternoon and after a kilometre’s walk from the bus drop-off point, we found ourselves in the largest concentration of white people without any smattering of brown whatsoever.

Yes, we were pretty much the only Indians at Rock Werchter. Normally that would give me a bit of pause, but this was Belgium. For most part, the locals have more pressing things to do, like trying out a new beer from one of the many monasteries there, reading comic books (there’s even a museum dedicated to the art) and generally managing to go on about life without a government (there hasn’t been one in a year) instead of worrying silly about what a few brown-skinned folks were doing at their music festival.

As soon as we got our wrist badges at the ticket counter, we quickly agreed to a “getting lost” protocol. As seasoned travellers and frequenters of massive musical festivals, this is quite crucial, especially when only one of the party has a working mobile phone (well, with international roaming). Even if two of us had phones, we’d still establish such a protocol considering how our phone companies back in India like to assume we are all like local sheep when we visit abroad. They tend to fleece us mercilessly.

We agreed on a place where we’d meet up if we got separated. And then we hit the stage for the first concert. Normally, there are two schools of thought in a rock concert audience placement strategy. Mine involves locating a suitable spot in the middle, not too close to the speakers. Others in my party preferred the “let’s get deaf” stratagem. So it didn’t take long before we got separated. No worries, I felt. We had our meet-up place so we about enjoying some great music (Warpaint, James Blake, et al) and eventually the headline band, Linkin Park.

That’s when things got crazy. Over 80,000 human beings standing close to each other, consuming large amounts of beer and also frequently indulging in amorous displays of the sort banned on Indian TV make it quite hard to locate others in your group, even if you had a Yaadon ki Baaraat-type song.

Announcements don’t work because they are drowned out by the music. And the average Belgian is well over six feet tall, which makes it even more difficult for a bunch of altitude-challenged Indians.

We did eventually meet each other at our designated place, but we missed the last train back to Brussels and had to deal with a contingent of Chennai auto-fellows masquerading as taxi drivers. But yeah, the music made up for it all. It always does.

— Slightly techie, moderately musical, severely blogging, timepassly tweeting