A first-hand account of the vandalism that occurred at the doomed Solis Music & Arts Festival in Islamabad this weekend. What does it point at and who is to blame?
“We’re in the front dancing and I blackout. What I realise next is the entire VIP Lounge collapsing. It was almost seven-feet high and I lost consciousness for a minute. I couldn’t figure out what’s happening, all I remember is me struggling to get up and a guy starts snatching my bag, I literally thought I would suffocate; while the guys there pick up the grill and start pushing it back while we’re stuck in it. I look at my friend and her leg’s stuck underneath the grill and a guy’s on top of her. We’re panicking, getting stamped upon and literally no one’s helping because these a**holes get a chance and start touching, groping and harassing us.”
In the above excerpts, Shanza, an Instagram blogger, is amongst the many women who described their ordeal at the recently held fourth-edition of the Solis Music & Arts Festival in Islamabad; Solis began as a series of concerts in the Capital, last year. Having attended both the events, this year’s show has left most of us traumatized and scarred. There have been countless girls and guys that were harassed at the concert — physically, verbally and sexually. A friend of mine got groped as soon as we had entered, whilst a heavy tippler held me by my collar and arm, not letting go until another friend had to push him back.
Solis was discomforting to say the least. The highly-publicised event that brought back Turhan James and French EDM group FDVM, had to forcefully be shut down mid-way, before Dutch musicians, DJs and record-producers, Julian Jordan, Mike Williams and Dannic could perform. Not only did the hysteria double after the event got cancelled, but elbow-benders made their way to the stage, destroyed the equipment, the set-up and in the process caused countless injuries.
Firstly, the management decided to shift venues from the Rock Musicariam, which hosted Solis last year and the Mad Decent Block Party featuring Diplo and Major Lazer the year before, to the Pakistan National Council of Arts, selling tickets beyond capacity of the cramped ground next to the theatre, and then deploying inadequate, clueless, unarmed security to deal with a crowd of thousands. I reached the venue when people had broken through barricades after being denied entry on either fake tickets, or amusingly enough, no tickets at all. I saw the last gate that led to backstage, crashing in front of me.
The entrance to the VIP Lounge had been blocked by men who weren’t welcome and, upon not being let in, climbed onto the stage before it crashed. Albeit not confirmed, there are reports of a man dying of suffocation under the stage. The overcrowding led to borderline persecution, on a Facebook group. Fatima Ahsan, in the VIP Lounge, said, “When I regained consciousness, a guy had fallen on top of me... moving his hands all over my body trying to get up. I pushed him and he spat on me. I tried to get up, but I couldn’t.”
PR maven, Frieha Altaf, a regular at Solis, attended with her son and budding DJ, Turhan. Over a telephonic conversation, she spoke of what she made of the chaos.
“When I entered the venue with Turhan, our bags were checked and the security was pretty top-notch. When FDVM started playing, I heard the opening, which was this really nice rendition of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, but I had to use the restroom so I had gone backstage and that’s when it all started happening,” she narrated her experience at the event. “I came out and that’s just when Julian had arrived, but he could not have performed. So we just stayed there while Victorien (from FDVM) left. I messaged my team and Anoushay (Ashraf); they were all safe and so I left around 11pm with Turhan.”
“I’m upset because it’s really sad when you are trying to hold a concert and something like this happens,” Altaf continued. “Ticketing was all done online and at some places in Islamabad, but people were buying them off the street; these are scalpers. I am actually with Solis here because we can’t give in to these sick people. In that moment, I was hearing things about how Islamabad doesn’t deserve events like these, but we cannot stop. I really hope we don’t.”
Exasperation, more often than not, manifests in the form of lawlessness, violence and downright vandalism, all that was witnessed at Solis. The management released a statement on their official Instagram handle a day after the event and excerpts of it read,
“We chose the venue and our security based on the number of tickets sold and made arrangements based on this. However, we underestimated the sheer volume of thousands of fake tickets that were being sold illegally. To those who believed in us and came to genuinely enjoy the show, we are deeply sorry that this experience was ruined by others. What some of you didn’t see was the further damage these individuals caused after we shut down. Crores of damage has set us back even further. While we will hold on Solis indefinitely in Islamabad, we will not let this define us. We will learn and preserve. We will be back.”
According to another Facebook status, the turnout, in the larger scheme of things, is symptomatic of a “frustrated society” that jumps at every opportunity of letting loose, at the cost of someone else. The blame, in some parts, lies on the years of suppression owing to the lack of outlets for people to engage in. Men and women, certainly men like the kind witnessed at Solis, have forgotten how to coexist with women.
