I woke up with a bit of anticipation. Today had to go well. I never thought about days going well or not before, but today it struck me.

The first full play practice with the instruments was scheduled at 10am.

I hoped it would be a successful one.

For the first time, all 11 of us assembled in the practice room at the same time, ready to rehearse. The practice started by 10:30am; my father brought the keyboard up. We got tables and chairs and shoes to mark the stage size… we were all fresh and ready. The only exception was Meghan, who was feeling slightly ill. We had to take extra care of her. Laptops were set up, and practice got rolling.

We rehearsed twice. The practice wasn’t perfect -yet, I saw it all coming together, and it was brilliant.

The practice allowed our instrumentalists to understand cues and the orders of the scenes. They caught on fast; I’m very proud.

At 12:30pm, practice ceased. We were unusually tired. We quickly went to Rashi’s house to finish off the melody finalization. After that, I retired to bed for a long afternoon nap. At 4pm, I met up with Isha and we discussed the schedule which we were to send to the crew tonight. At 4:30pm we returned home, due to sudden personal developments. At 6pm, though, we were able to meet again. We collected costumes from all houses. Props, too. This time was ideal because the parents of our crew members would be home from work by then. We would visit the houses of our crew and basically spent a good 15-20 minutes at each house collecting whatever they could offer to us to use for the play. At 8pm, we finished the collection for the day.

After dinner, from 11pm-12am (sorry mom), Isha and I talked over the phone to settle the schedule out. Then, I sent it. I also sent a whole bunch of videos and recordings and lyrics to the crew for them to practice. It took a long time, especially since the files had to be uploaded onto DropBox, and from there, onto an email I had to send to myself. From there, I had to rename them and then send them separately to the crew members (depending on what they required). By 12am, I had finished sending about 18-20 emails in total to different people. I had tried to make them as detailed as possible so that there was no scope for ambiguity.

Sure, we couldn’t that much today – but whatever we did symbolised great progress.  I’m proud of us – and the crew!