The Front Row Was Never Just a Seat

Every Rabindra Jayanti, Kolkata finds a way to remember Rabindranath Tagore in public.

There are songs, flowers, old photographs, school memories, familiar lines, newer captions. A lot of it is moving, almost like a routine. A lot of it is exactly the kind of reverence that makes you stand a little awkwardly because you know the feeling is real, but the language around it has become too rehearsed.

I do not always know how to write about Tagore directly. He is too large, and I have a deep fear of sounding like a school assembly.

But today, I found myself thinking of him through a place.

Jorasanko.

And through a version of myself who once spent winter days volunteering at literary festivals in Kolkata, wearing a badge that made me feel more important than I probably was.

The first front row

It began before Jorasanko, though.

It began at the Kolkata Literary Festival, the one held in conjunction with the International Kolkata Book Fair. I had gone there as a reader, the most ordinary kind. I wanted to attend a session by one of my favourite authors, and like most ordinary readers, I was mostly concerned with getting a decent seat. I didn't get any!

Then I saw them.

People my age, sitting in the front rows, moving around with the ease of people who belonged there. They had access. Not glamorous access, not the kind that comes with tinted cars and handlers, but something more fascinating to me then. They could enter spaces I could only look at from a distance. They knew where to stand, whom to ask, when to move, what to do.

I remember wondering what it took to be there, and I started my research.

The next year, I was there.

Not permanently or dramatically. Not in a life-changing montage with a Rabindra Sangeet playing in the background, though Kolkata would probably allow it.

I was part of the social media team for that festival for one year. That was my first small crossing over. From audience to access, from watching the literary world happen to trying, in a very tiny way, to help document it as it happened.

And like most things you admire from a distance, it became both more magical and less glamorous the closer I got.

By then, I was already writing about books. I had been a book reviewer for a long while, which is a strange identity to carry when you are young and very serious about stories. It gives you a kind of private confidence. You begin to think you understand books because you can write about them. Then you enter a literary festival and realise books are only one part of the ecosystem.

There are authors, publishers, moderators, organisers, volunteers, journalists, publicists, and celebrities who have written books; authors who have become celebrities; and people who are both but pretend to be neither. There are green rooms and authors’ lounges. There are schedules that look perfect on paper and collapse beautifully by lunch. There are delayed flights, missing cars, confused delegates, overexcited audiences, dead phone batteries, dead laptops, printed notes, half-working mics, camera batteries, signing queues, and someone always asking where the next session is.

A literary festival looks elegant from the audience.

Behind the scenes, it is controlled chaos wearing a nice kurta.

The badge and what it taught me

After that first year, my real volunteering chapter began with the Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival and Apeejay Bangla Sahitya Utsab.

AKLF and ABSU became the places where I learned that access is not just about being allowed into a room. Sometimes access means becoming responsible for what happens inside and around that room.

In my first year at AKLF, I was the city point of contact for a delegate from outside Kolkata. That meant airport pickups, coordination, schedules, movement, calls, messages, and generally functioning like a temporary personal assistant while pretending I knew exactly what I was doing.

Truth be told, I did not always know.

But I learned.

I learned how to keep track of someone else’s day. I learned how to be calm when things were not calm. I learned how to solve problems before they became visible. I learned that festivals run on planning, yes, but also on instinct, jugaad, politeness, and volunteers who can look composed while mentally screaming.

From ABSU year one and AKLF year two onwards, I moved into the social media side of things. Not in the sense of deciding what post would go up and when. No, that was not my job. My part was closer to the ground. Interviews, author bytes, quick questions, photos, notes, cameras, and mics; running between sessions, figuring out who would speak to which author, making sure the question was not lazy, making sure we were ready when the author was.

That brought a different kind of access.

The Authors’ Lounge.

Even now, the phrase feels slightly unreal.

Being part of that team meant you had to be presentable. Not in a superficial way, though that mattered too. It meant knowing when to speak and when to shut up. When to approach someone and when to let them breathe. When to ask a question, when to step back, and when to take charge quietly without making the management feel like you had become another problem to solve.

That was the real skill.

Not access. Conduct.

We would interview authors and celebrities there. We would catch people between sessions, request quick bytes, get signatures, take photos, check names, confirm titles, compare notes, and try to make the festival feel as alive on camera as it did around us.

There were people I met there whom I had never imagined I could ever get close to. Authors I had read. Names I had seen printed on book covers. People who had existed, until then, as acknowledgements, bios, interviews and distant literary figures. Suddenly, they were sitting across from us, answering questions, asking for tea, checking the time, laughing, waiting for their next session.

It is very difficult to explain what that does to a young person who loves books.

It does not make you cynical exactly. But it does humanise the mythology.

You realise authors are people. Some are warm, some are tired, some are generous, some are difficult. Some are exactly how you imagined, and some are not. Some give you one good sentence and leave. Some stay in your memory because of the way they spoke when the camera was off.

For someone who had once stood outside the front row, trying to understand how people got in, this was a lot.

And yes, other volunteers noticed.

Our group had access to the authors, the lounge, the interviews, and the spaces that were not open to everyone. That made us visible in a way I did not fully understand then. Other volunteers would look at us as if we knew more, had more, were closer to the centre of things. We were the cool seniors!

Maybe we were, practically speaking.

But mostly, we were problem solvers.

That is what the badge really meant.

Not importance. Responsibility.

If someone had to be found, we found them. If a schedule changed, we adjusted. If an author had to be moved, briefed, seated, recorded or rescued from an awkward delay, someone from the team handled it. If a question had to be prepared before a session, we sat together and worked it out. If the camera had to be ready, someone checked it. If the mic had to be tested, someone did it. If we had to run from one venue to another, we ran. And literally, WE RAN in the middle of the heavy traffic!

The front row had looked glamorous from the outside.

From the inside, it was logistics.

But I loved it.

I loved the rush of it. I loved being useful, the backstage friendships that formed without announcement. The kind built over shared snacks, rushed lunches, long days, bad jokes, tired feet, water breaks, phone chargers, quick gossip, group photos, and the collective panic of realising an author was available now, and we had exactly two minutes to get the question right.

Those friendships belonged to the pre-COVID world in a way I cannot fully explain. And even today, that group means the whole world to me.

Mornings began early for us. Days stretched into late evenings. You ate when you could, you sat when no one needed you, you looked for your team between venues, you checked schedules like they were exam papers. You discussed who would take which author, who knew which book, who could ask what, who had better camera hands, who was less likely to freeze.

And all of it, mostly, for free.

For a certificate. For access. For the thrill. For the story. For the feeling that you were briefly part of something larger than yourself.

That sounds foolish when written plainly.

It did not feel foolish then.

It felt like possibility.

I loved being close to literature, not as an idea, but as a living, sweating, time-bound event. I loved that books were no longer private objects on my shelf. They had become public, crowded, chaotic and alive.

That was the real shift.

As a reader, books had always been intimate. They belonged to my room, my bag, my commute, my badly lit late nights, my reviews, my opinions that felt extremely important at the time.

At the festivals, books became communal.

They became queues outside sessions, audience questions that were not always questions, applause, debates, signing lines, stage lights, camera angles, rushed interviews, and volunteers whispering into phones because someone was running late.

At Jorasanko

And then there was Jorasanko.

Apeejay Bangla Sahitya Utsab had a different charge because of where it happened. Jorasanko Thakurbari is not a neutral venue. You cannot treat it like just another festival location, even if you are there with a schedule in hand and three tasks waiting.

It is Rabindranath Tagore’s home.

That sentence is too simple for what the place does.

There is a weight to Jorasanko, but not in a suffocating way. More like a reminder. You walk through it knowing that language has lived there before you arrived. Music, literature, theatre, thought, argument, inheritance, all of it seems to sit in the walls.

And then there you are, sitting in the library before a session, figuring out questions for panellists with your fellow volunteers.

That memory has stayed with me more than many of the big ones.

Not because it was dramatic. It was not. We were probably tired. We were probably checking names and topics and trying to make sure the questions sounded intelligent but not pretentious. But there was something absurdly moving about doing that work there, inside that house, at that library.

Maybe it was the old quiet of the library, or the way the house made everyone lower their voice without being told.

It made the ordinary task feel slightly unreal.

We were not writing history.

We were preparing questions.

But the place made even preparation feel like an act of respect.

Maybe that is why I am thinking about all this today. Not because I have a grand Rabindra Jayanti tribute to offer. I don’t. But because some of my strongest memories of literary volunteering are tied to the house where Tagore is no longer present and somehow always present.

At Jorasanko, even the mundane felt borrowed from history.

I have volunteered at other festivals and events too, not all literary. Music festivals have been part of my life as well, but that is a different story. A louder one. A more electric one. A story with stages, soundchecks, crowds, performers, lights and a different kind of backstage pulse.

I have also worked around theatre festivals, where the energy is different again. Theatre has its own backstage grammar. People speak in cues, props, entrances, exits, timing, and silence. A performer waiting in the wings carries a very different kind of tension from an author waiting for a panel or a musician waiting for soundcheck. But the core feeling is similar. You are close to the making of something. You are not the reason people have gathered, but you are part of the invisible structure that lets the gathering happen.

That kind of work teaches you things no classroom can. How to read a room, how to not panic visibly, how to move quickly without looking rushed, how to speak to people who are important without becoming strange about it. How to understand that backstage is not glamour, it is labour with better stories.

But the literary festivals stayed with me differently.

Maybe because I had entered them first as a reader. Maybe because I had already been a book reviewer and wanted, secretly, to belong to the world that produced the things I wrote about. Maybe because Kolkata makes literature feel less like a niche interest and more like weather. It is just around. In book fairs, street stalls, college festivals, old houses, coffee shops, long arguments and people who quote things even when no one asked.

The years since COVID have been different.

I have not volunteered in the same way since then. It has been six years since my last proper volunteering activity, which is a strange thing to write because it does not feel that far away in memory. The rhythm broke. Public life stopped, then returned, but I did not return to that particular version of myself.

By then, life had shifted too. I had joined a day job. Digital marketing. Content writing. Responsibility, but of a different kind. The kind that comes with deadlines, clients, calendars, edits, strategy, performance, and the quiet adult realisation that time is not as elastic as it once felt.

For a while, I still tried. I would take breaks from work during lit fest days and go back to that old rhythm. The badge, the venue, the running around, the quick lunch, the interviews, the author lounge, the team. I was already becoming someone else professionally, but for those few days, I could still return to the version of me who knew how to move through a festival without needing a map.

Then COVID hit.

And after that, everything changed in ways that were both obvious and not. The festivals still happen. Sometimes shorter. Sometimes not at the same scale, or maybe I am the one who no longer has the same scale of time to give them. These days, I barely have time to look at myself in the mirror, forget spending entire days running between venues with a camera, a notebook and three unanswered calls.

That sounds dramatic. It is also accurate.

The event instinct

But the strange thing is, I did not leave that world completely. It followed me into work.

And yet, the event instinct never really left.

Even now, in my day job, when I have to help plan an event, build the marketing around it, think through speaker questions, shape a conference flow, or write the content that sits around it, something in me switches on. A younger version of me recognises the room before I enter it.

I used to think those festival years were a detour from real work. Now I think they were one of the first places where I learned how real work actually moves.

There was a time, years later, when a company I used to work at was participating in a global event, and I was responsible for curating the conference from offshore. Not just one neat piece of it. The whole messy, moving thing. Speakers, questions, sessions, delegates, time zones, hotel check-ins, coordination. Then the marketing around it. Pre-event posts, live or during-event updates, post-event articles, follow-up content, collaterals, design inputs, standee planning, conversations with printers, checking what would go where, and making sure the story of the event did not fall apart before, during or after the actual event.

I barely slept.

My body ran on adrenaline and bad timing. There were different time zones to keep in mind, different people to follow up with, and different things that could go wrong if one email was missed or one asset was delayed. It was not glamorous. It was not poetic. It was a lot of tabs open, a lot of “just checking in,” and the quiet terror of knowing that something live has no real undo button.

But I knew that rush.

I had known it in another form before. At literary festivals, running between venues, checking schedules, preparing questions, speaking to authors, handling cameras and mics, trying to look calm while three things needed attention at once.

The scale had changed. The language had changed. The stakes had changed.

The instinct had not.

The event ended, and then I fell sick for a week, as if my body had politely waited for permission to collapse.

That is the thing about events. They take from you in ways you do not always notice while they are happening. While the thing is live, you keep moving. You solve. You adjust. You respond. You do not have the luxury of being tired because the day has not ended yet. Then the lights go off, the final post goes out, the last email is sent, post-event analysis is shared with the team, and suddenly your body remembers it has been keeping score.

Still, even after all that, I understand the pull.

There is something about events that brings the rush back. The urgency. The people. The invisible work. The knowledge that, for a short while, everyone is building toward the same moment. Maybe that is why the festival years stayed with me. They did not just give me access; they trained a part of me that still wakes up when there is a live thing to hold together.

Maybe that is why Jaipur still sits somewhere in the back of my mind.

Because some dreams are stubborn. A part of me still thinks about working at the Jaipur Literature Festival someday. Not as a wide-eyed volunteer trying to enter the front row anymore, but as someone who has already known the rush, the discipline, the backstage logic, the author handling, the questions, the chaos, the conduct. I wonder what I would be like there now. More composed, surely. Less easily impressed, maybe. Better at reading people. Better at solving problems before they become public.

But I hope I would still feel something.

Because if I ever stand inside one of the largest literary festivals in the country, I do not want to be so grown-up that I forget what the first front row meant.

What I was really looking at

I think often about the girl at the Kolkata Literary Festival, trying to get a seat for her favourite author’s session and looking at people her age in the front row.

She thought she wanted access to writers.

She did. Of course she did.

But now I think she wanted something more than that. She wanted access to a life where literature was not just something she consumed privately. She wanted to stand close to the machinery of it, to see how books left pages and entered rooms, to see how writers became voices, how readers became audiences, how a city gathered around language and called it a festival.

The front row was never just a seat.

It was a symbol. A childish one, maybe, but not a false one.

It meant there was a door somewhere.

And for a few years, I got to walk through it.

Not as an author. Not as someone important. Not as the person people had come to see.

As a volunteer. A coordinator. A social media team member. A temporary PA. A problem solver. A book reviewer with a badge. A young woman trying to look like she belonged in rooms she had once only watched from outside.

That is enough.

In fact, that may be the more honest kind of belonging.

The kind where no one hands you the centre, but you learn how to move around it. The kind where access comes with work attached. The kind where you are close enough to see the magic and the mess, and lucky enough to understand that both are part of the same thing.

Today, on Rabindra Jayanti, I am thinking of Jorasanko. Of winter festivals. Of author interviews. Of airport pickups. Of front rows. Of the Authors’ Lounge. Of cameras and mics. Of notes scribbled before sessions. Of autographs. Of running between venues. Of food breaks with the team and the management. Of volunteers who looked at us the way I had once looked at others. Of the strange little ladder by which a reader became a reviewer, then a volunteer, then someone briefly trusted with proximity.

I do not know if I will volunteer like that again.

Maybe I don’t need to. Or maybe the next version of that life will look different. Less like volunteering, more like work. Less like access, more like experience finally finding the right room.

Some experiences do not ask to be repeated in the same form. They ask to be understood later.

And today, years after that first front row, I think I finally understand what I was really looking at.

Not access.

Possibility.