I Didn’t Discover U2. U2 Kept Finding Me.

U2 are 50.

Which feels slightly rude.

Because somewhere in my head, they are still the band I discovered when I was young, bought on cassette, hunted down album by album, and eventually followed all the way to a concert in Singapore.

Except that's not quite how it happened.

November 18 has always been a significant day for me.

Those who know Gakkai, and those who know me closely, will know why. It was also my maasi Meena's birthday.

I didn't know then that November 18, 1991 had another claim to significance in my life.

It was the day Achtung Baby was released.

I wouldn't discover that until much later, when MTV arrived at home courtesy of the local cable guys, and suddenly there was U2.

Of course, The Joshua Tree was big. With or Without You was even bigger. U2 existed. I knew who they were.

But Achtung Baby hit home.

Hit my heart.

Hit all the possible buttons.

Maybe it was the twisted lyrics of The Fly.

Maybe it was the whole strange, dark, seductive world of the album.

Whatever it was, something clicked.

And that was it.

I was a U2 fan.

The CDs are still there. Trust me.

I had the Achtung Baby tape. Then our household bought a CD player, and I got to choose the first CD.

Obviously, I chose Achtung Baby.

Rs 550.

I wasn't one of those people who had been there from the beginning, patiently waiting through Boy, October and War.

I arrived later.

Very deliberately.

If The Fly wasn't twisted enough, Zooropa followed with all its strange, brilliant energy.

Be a winner, eat to get slimmer.

They were talking to me.

Of course, once I had become a U2 fan, I had a problem.

I had to go backwards.

So I hunted down Boy. Then October. War. Under the Blood Red Sky. The Unforgettable Fire.The Joshua Tree was always around. Obviously.

This was how fandom worked then.

You found someone who had the album.

Or knew someone who had the album.

Or knew someone coming down from the West.

I knew that someone.

Sheila. My friend, then in Ohio.

Sheila also contributed to my collection of U2 posters, because apparently becoming a fan required wall decoration.

My favorite model with my early poster collection.

Then my mother went to the US for a few months.

My entire discography was hence updated.

This was before you could summon an entire back catalogue with a tap.

Music had logistics.

And geography.

And favours.

And people.

I had found U2.

I just hadn't yet realised how many times they were going to find me.

1997

I popped up in Australia.

New country. New life. New version of me.

There were heartbreaks. Highs. Lows. Mostly highs, because I was in a new country, figuring things out and discovering a different version of myself.

And Pop was there.

Do You Feel Loved was there.

And then there was Gone.

It wasn't simply a breakup song.

It was about the complicated things we do to ourselves and to people we love. About hurting yourself, hurting your lover, and then discovering that what you thought was freedom may not have been freedom at all.

"You hurt yourself, you hurt your lover."

That line stayed with me.

I didn't necessarily understand every U2 song intellectually.

I did, emotionally.

And sometimes that was enough.

Then came Kite

All That You Can't Leave Behind gave me Kite.

The following year, my maasi Meena passed away.

And suddenly the song changed.

That's one of the strange things about music.

The recording doesn't change.

You do.

A song can sit quietly in your collection for years and then life walks in carrying something heavy, and suddenly you hear it differently.

Kite became grief. Memory. Goodbye.

It became something I wanted to believe. It stayed with me

through the passing of Amie to Pinto.

There were more

How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb brought its own collection of gems.

Yahweh stayed with me, with its image of love as a drop in the ocean.

Then came No Line on the Horizon.

Magnificent.

Moment of Surrender.

I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight.

Those three have remained favourites.

Then Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience arrived, and for me they sit almost back to back.

All the tracks matter.

There were singles too.

Summer Rain became my Hotmail signature.

Yes.

Hotmail.

I was that person.

And there was The Saints Are Coming, U2 with Green Day, which I can't not mention.

Call me a U2 nerd.

Yah.

They even have a song called Your Song Saved My Life.

So technically, I have evidence.

Then I finally went to see them

For years, U2 existed for me through cassettes, CDs, posters, headphones and the accumulated soundtrack of my life.

I had never seen them live.

When they announced their Asia tour, India wasn't part of the original plan.

Japan was an obvious possibility. I had always wanted to visit the SGI headquarters there too, so that would have been a dream trip.

Unfortunately, the Japanese tickets disappeared within minutes.

Singapore sold out almost as quickly.

Then they added another concert.

I got a ticket.

So I went to Singapore alone to see U2.

I still like saying that.

Somewhere between buying that ticket and the concert, they announced a Mumbai show for the same month.

Typical.

I bought that ticket too.

But there was no question of giving up Singapore.

By then I had already decided I was going.

There were fans there who had taken this to an entirely different level. People who travelled from country to country following the tour, saving for concerts, knowing the venues, knowing where to stand, knowing how early to arrive. They had their own communities and rituals built around U2.

I wasn't one of them.

I was simply a fan who had finally decided that if U2 weren't coming to me, I was going to go to them.

And Singapore turned out to be much more than a concert.

There was Tejas, who had been a regular at Gostana, waiting for me at the airport.

There was a stranger from Hyderabad who appeared on the train and disappeared again into his own life.

There were two Indian sisters from England and a Pakistani gentleman from Hong Kong, whom I met at the venue.

One

There was Suhaas calling from Mumbai just before the concert to wish me luck.

There were all these people who had travelled from different places for the same reason.

I had gone to Singapore alone.

That didn't mean I was alone.

And then there was the concert.

I barely slept the night before.

On the day, I lived mostly on one cold coffee.

Then I stood in front of U2.

One of the people I'd met at the venue and I were talking about songs while we waited. Somehow the conversation came to With or Without You.

I told him I had never really connected with it.

He was genuinely surprised.

I said maybe I hadn't fallen deeply enough in love with anyone to relate to it.

Then U2 came on.

And when they played With or Without You, something happened that I hadn't expected.

I cried.

Apparently I didn't need to have lived the song to understand it.

I just needed to hear it live.

For me, With or Without You became with or without U2.

I had waited years to see them and suddenly they were right there.

The lights. The music. The crowd. All those people who had travelled from different places for the same reason.

It was exactly what I had hoped it would be.

And then they came home

Two weeks later, I was in Mumbai.

15 December 2019.

Singapore had taught me how to do a U2 concert.

Not just how to watch one, but how to do one properly.

So I knew what I was doing.

Or at least I thought I did.

Singapore had given me number 177 (Early fan general entry).

Mumbai gave Sid and me numbers 27 and 28.

We had learnt.

Then, because this was Mumbai, my phone started ringing.

The world knew I was a U2 fan.

Apparently, the world had forgotten that I wasn't their friend, manager or event organiser.

What time was the band arriving?

Which route was best?

Where should they park?

Which entrance should they use?

Did the stadium serve beer?

I put my phone on silent.

Immediately.

Eventually, Sid and I got into the concert and made our way to Stage B.

And then I had one of those moments when your brain takes a little while to catch up with your life.

There was a tall man with a camera, talking to people.

He asked us a few questions.

So I talked.

About Singapore. About finally having U2 play in Mumbai. About the years of waiting.

Five minutes later, I realised who I had been talking to.

Anton Corbijn.

U2's official photographer.

The man whose work I had followed for years.

And I hadn't recognised him.

I had spent years following U2 closely enough to recognise their songs from half a second, but not their photographer standing directly in front of me.

Fair.

Then the concert began.

We were right under Bono's nose.

At one point I yelled, "Bono, I love you!"

He looked over and gave me a namaste.

I died.

Everyone around me screamed.

I died again.

Then they played Bad.

And I started crying.

Properly.

There I was, in Mumbai, watching the band I had spent years collecting, listening to, travelling for and occasionally using as emotional infrastructure.

Except now they weren't coming through a speaker.

They were standing in front of me.

The band had finally come home.

Fifty years

U2 are 50.

I've been a fan for a fraction of that time, but long enough for the songs to have travelled through several versions of me.

That's what I think about when I think about U2 now.

Not the albums in order.

Not the statistics.

Not which era was better.

I think about where I was when a song found me.

Achtung Baby, when I was young enough to have my entire world rearranged by 12 songs and Rs 550.

Zooropa, when they were apparently talking directly to me.

Pop, in Australia. With Gone, somewhere in the middle of heartbreak and figuring out what freedom actually meant.

Kite, after Meena passed away.

Yahweh.

Magnificent.

Moment of Surrender.

Every Breaking Wave.

With or Without You in Singapore, a song I thought I didn't understand until suddenly I did.

Bad in Mumbai, when I was standing close enough to see Bono's face and far enough away to realise how many years had passed between that moment and the kid who first bought the records.

Sometimes I found the song.

Sometimes the song found me.

That's what happens with music you keep for a long time.

You don't listen to it once.

You grow into it.

You leave it behind.

You come back.

You hear something you missed the first time.

You become someone else.

The song waits.

I didn't discover U2 by accident.

I went looking.

I bought the records. I hunted down the albums. I travelled to see them.

But after that, something funny happened.

Their songs kept finding me.

And eventually, in Singapore and then in Mumbai, I found them too.

Or perhaps, after all those years of I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, they finally found me.