1. Pure Chaos

It has been around five or six months since a completely random day when I got called to play the keyboard for a choir that had just been formed from scratch. I honestly thought it was a simple job where I would show up and play whenever I had some free time, and the kids would handle the rest on their own. About 20 to 22 kids had joined back in May, and they were super energetic, mostly because the choir gave them a reason to spend more time with their gang. Nobody there was thinking about music at that point, and I certainly wasn’t thinking about leadership.

That plan lasted until the second day, when they looked at me and said, “Teach us to sing, bruhh.” I assumed it would be a temporary arrangement that would sort itself out in a week or two, but fast forward to today and I am the one leading them, which still makes me laugh whenever I think about it.

I had never led a choir before, although I have been part of one since my childhood. Over the years I have been a keyboardist, a tenor and even a soprano, so I know how a choir works from the inside. Knowing how to sit in a choir and knowing how to run one are two very different things, though, and I found that out quickly. I had also never sung and played the keyboard at the same time, so that was a first for me, and the funny part is that everything was a first for everyone involved. None of us knew what we were doing, and we all figured it out together as we went along.

The first song I picked was the famous German chorale “Tut mir auf die schöne Pforte” (Open Now Thy Gates of Beauty), and I would not recommend starting there if you want an easy life. The Tamil version has seven stanzas, and I spent every bit of my energy just getting the kids to sing the first one properly. Some of them could not read Tamil at all, some had no idea what a scale was, and none of them had come to learn music theory. They were there to hang out with their friends, and trying to teach theory to a group like that would have been a losing battle from the beginning.

So I came up with a shortcut that no sane choir master would ever use, which was to ask them to simply mimic me. They watched how I pronounced each word, listened to how I sang it, and repeated it back, with no notation and no explanation in between. We practiced that one song every day for five days, from 8 to 9 in the evening, and it was a hell of an experience. In the end it worked, and somehow I even managed to teach them to sing with an interlude in between while staying on the scale, which I consider a real achievement given where we started.

Once the first song was finally behind us, I did something that felt natural at the time but turned out to be one of the smartest things I did in those early weeks. I asked the kids about their favorite hymns and the songs they usually sang in church or in their own neighborhoods, and I made a list of everything that came up. Some of them were hymns I had grown up with, some were regional songs I had not touched in years, and a few were ones I had to learn properly myself before I could teach them. Letting them pick gave them a sense of ownership, and I noticed that the same kids who yawned through the German chorale suddenly sat up straight when we started on something they actually loved.

It was pure fun, chaos and experience all at once. Every practice had a bit of each, with some kids singing their hearts out, some whispering jokes to the friend next to them, and me trying to hold it all together with a keyboard in front of me and a voice that was already tired. This was the first time in my life that I was acting like a sane person and a leader, and I am still not completely sure how I pulled it off. I made mistakes in front of them, corrected myself in front of them, and slowly realized that the kids respected honesty far more than they respected perfection.

Then came the mistake I am still thinking about. All my years in the choir had taught me one thing, which was that we always practiced without a mic and only used one during the actual performance. I figured the same would work for these kids, so I never let them practice with a mic at all. In my head I was playing 5D chess, imagining that a clean and natural sound in practice would carry over easily on the big day. It was a huge mistake, and I paid the price for it on the dedication day.

I will talk about what exactly went wrong in part 2, so come back for that story.

The biggest lesson from these months has been patience, along with a better understanding of what it means to deal with a group of under 5 feet monsters. I suddenly felt responsible for every one of them, and that feeling has not gone away. Every single day they test my patience in a new way, and it has been a hell of a journey so far.

Many of them irritated me and teased me during practice, and since I am the older one, I gave it right back to them in my own way. I used to be the backbencher in the choir myself, so whenever they disturbed me while I was teaching, I knew exactly what they were up to, and that did not make it any easier to handle. There were days when I shouted and days when I asked a kid to go out of the room, and there were also many moments when I had to control my mouth because it was a church and I did not want to say something I would regret.

Before every practice I pray quietly, asking God to give me patience and to keep me from sinning against these kids or setting a bad example for them. Some days that prayer works better than others, but it keeps me going back each evening.