Before Covid, New Year meant popular celebrity nights in India and abroad. But things have changed now, because the pandemic shows are not happening. Rajender Singh Pahl, president of Star Promotions Inc., shares that the situation has been grim given the situation, however, things are looking up, but it will take some more time.
“As everyone knows that during New Year’s Eve, a lot of celebrities came to the USA from India and people used to enjoy it with a lot of pomp and happiness. Lately, for the past two years, because of the pandemic, many things have changed. No one has seen anything like celebrating a proper New Year’s Eve or Christmas. Even though with a lot of courage and precautions, people had started attending the concerts and events, but again due to omicron, people are scared. As far as I understand, omicron will not have its impact for long and within a few days, things will again normalize. Most probably from next year, regular concerts would start but there would be a lot of precautions and guidelines that organisers, celebrities and the audience will have to follow. If we all stick to the rules, then I don’t think it would be affected much,” says Rajender.
For Indians abroad, such concerts were a big draw. “That will remain. When we restart concerts next year, planning of which have already started, things will look brighter again,” he adds.
Rajender also shares that online concerts cannot be a substitute for live performances. “As soon as the pandemic had started, many people had started doing solo online concerts and many people had tried doing small group events online as well. I have always felt that the live concerts can never be replaced by online events because live music and performance have a different feel, it creates a different kind of atmosphere. I also must say that it was quite an immaturity of many to start live concerts soon, given the virus threat. Definitely online press conferences and meetings are fine but live concerts require a live audience,” he ends.
