Partying Saved Me

2024 is the year I discovered my penchant for partying.

I am twenty-two years old, single, and living in a big city with several of my best friends. I have no big accomplishments or no any fully realized career goals right now. I know I want to teach people something and I know I want to write, but beyond this, I know nothing. I want some notoriety too, I think. I want to have children when I’m older. Some things I am certain about. I love going out, I love getting ready with my best friends, I love singing in the Uber ride on the way to the club, and I love drinking a suspicious liquid mixed hastily in a Sprite bottle being passed around right outside the club trying to avoid the bouncer’s fastidious gaze. I love smoking with my fellow club frequenters, and looking around the room in anticipation of a cute stranger, and most of all, I love dancing.

There have been several pieces published about Brat, the album and 2024 being “The Year of the Party Girl” and it just so happened that my revelation coincided with the year Partying supposedly came back. My favourite tracks off of Brat are Club Classics, Everything is romantic, and B2B - all for the same reason that repetition is my favourite poetic device. I like saying things again and again. Repetition produces extraordinary meaning and tautology will never be a crime to me. I love Club Classics because it’s the perfect party song. It’s loud and catchy with the right-now refrain throughout the song (any song that gives the DJ instructions has a well-established historical precedent of being a banger). But b2b is a whole other beautiful thing. It’s got only two or three lines of lyrics — I don’t wanna fall back to us, Maybe you should run right back to her, I don’t wanna go back to back to back to back…. And the back to back goes on and on. The metaphor of going back-to-back with another DJ being used to talk about an on-again-off-again relationship is so simple - repetition implies a constant movement, a to-and-fro sort of thing and I am quite taken by the inevitability of the relationship cycle of two people perpetually falling in and out of love with each other. It is to me, the guiding force of life.

On one fateful May afternoon, I decided to (like several other annoying people these days) dabble in the DJing arts. I had become increasingly frustrated with the state of affairs of the music I was listening to at the club and desperately needed to take matters into my own hands. I have a certain aversion to techno music because the greatest thing about going out to me is getting to yell really loud when I’m drunk and dancing and that is a desire Techno music cannot fulfil for me. And there’s only like maybe five dance moves you can do to a techno song. I believe I have a decent skill in reading a room, and I consider that to be the hallmark of a good DJ. I know nothing about music and all my music-related knowledge comes from Glee and various other musical theatre things but I still think I could become a DJ if I tried (We must all think we can become anything if we tried, such is the beauty of repetition, practice, and desire etc). I am always thinking of setlists in my head, and which songs would transition well into other ones, and I am quite observant of my surroundings at the club, so I thought these skills could translate well into a potential real future in the DJing realm. It sounded terribly inane and quite funny, to be honest, to go around proclaiming to people that I am a DJ in the making, but over the last few months, I have decided to embrace it and truly give this a shot. I am nowhere near good enough to play a professional set anywhere, but maybe soon in a few months, I shall try my luck. I am currently only playing around with a bunch of pirated applications on my laptop so I am not used to the tactility of any mixing equipment yet, but it is my current dream to be well-acquainted with a DJ in the business who can take me under their wing and teach me the tricks of the trade. If anybody reading this happens to be skilled in the art, I’d love for you to text me.

In 2024, I’ve been heartbroken, I’ve been scorned, I’ve been tired and annoyed, sick and despondent to the point of no return. But my only respite in these trying times is the promise of a transcendental night out with my best friends. There’s something sexy about it, something so liberating to me. It’s so freeing to be in a room full of sweaty strangers, dancing and moving to music in the hopes that something so big is going to come and change the course of all our nights. Your astigmatism is acting up because of the flashing of the strobe lights and your eyes are starting to pain ever so slightly but you don’t mind, you’re young and will find a way to cope. It is nice to be reminded that you are young and that your body can handle a lot right now.

Delhi is perhaps the most romantic city I’ve lived in and the best thing about the club is that it is temporarily a world of its own. The interactions are short-lived, the kisses are only for inside the club space and don’t ever move out of their designated after-midnight temporality into the real-world daylight hours. The connections are fleeting, transient but still glorious and not any less filled with love or desire. Two lives intersect on a Delhi dancefloor. You don’t know who this person is but you exchange a cigarette and make nervous and unimportant conversation. The night is teeming with promise and potential.

Yes, every night out is not this flashing disco lights, perfect-stranger utopia that I am describing. This is Delhi. The night is also full of creepy men, vomiting the contents of your dinner outside the club in a potted plant, and losing track of your best friend’s whereabouts, and being stuck in a crowded room without anybody to hold your hand. The night is full of danger, uncertainty, and anxiety. Every time I go out, I gamble with my life a little bit maybe but I am living on the prayer that the gamble is worth it in the end.

I can’t remember a time when I was more excited for something. I went out to see Violet Chachki when she came to Delhi in February of this year. I’d never seen a performance of that grandeur happening so close to me. The only other times I’ve been in a room full of people who wanted the same thing as badly as I did are whenever I’ve been at a place of worship and that’s what being in an audience of a drag show felt like. I cried so much, at least seven different times during the performances. Violet was like a sign from some God that I must trust what the Night can bring to me and that I should commit to a year of partying and let these memories transform me. Despite all my bold professions, I still consider myself to be a pretty tame partier. I am not doing anything too crazy most nights. I am primarily just dancing and singing and having the occasional drink. When my best friend Isha used to live in Delhi and we’d go out together, we’d come back home limbs aching and we never had the energy (or the sobriety) to walk up the three flights of stairs to her house, so we’d just go walking up and down her E Block street. We’d play with all the dogs that lived there, and we’d listen to music and we’d go visit this one house that was covered in vines and creepers. Isha always thought it was a beautiful house.

Isha took this of me one evening while walking to memorialize the House

It became our tradition to walk around for a bit after a night out before we confronted the face of the dreadful, daunting staircase. On the days that I come back to campus with my friends, we usually come back so ravenous and hungry and end up eating all sorts of snacks that we purchase from this one Bhaiya who lives under my hostel, until all the inebriation goes away. But every time I come back drunk and see a dog who is even remotely my friend, I almost always indulge this unassuming dog in some song or dance, and it is another one of my favourite parts of going out.

Life always feels good when I am talking to a dog on the road and the dog and me form this ephemeral, meaningful bond.

I feel like I am constantly feeling the pangs of growing older and having to figure out what kind of person I want to be, what kind of research I want to do, or if I want to even get a PhD in the first place. The club seems like the only place in my life when the likes of Derrida or Lacan cannot reach me. There is a pure unbridled joy in being youthful and finding connection in these decaying times and I want to keep nurturing those connections and sentiments. These nights are nights of great education too - I am learning about the city I live in, I am learning what the streets of Delhi are like at 2 am. I am learning what the people around me do for a living and what the flirting conventions are. I am learning about the DJ and his habits. I am learning about my own sobriety or the lack thereof. I am learning about my gut and its limitations in the morning.