Boney M and Akon make the hills come alive at Shillong’s Cherry Blossom Festival

The festival saw nearly 50,000 in footfall as acts from across the world, including J-pop stars, performed

My first trip to Shillong’s two-day-long Cherry Blossom Music Festival takes 15 hours. Nevertheless 1970s disco funk group Boney M is performing, and so is R&B and hiphop sensation Akon, so it is well worth the long and admittedly tedious journey.

As I reach Guwahati and hop on to the cab assigned to me, Sachin Singh, a Shillong-born Punjabi driver, zips through the serpentine highway that leads to our destination, only to get caught in a two-hour long traffic jam just 15-20 kilometres from the festival’s venue, RBDSA Sports Complex. We finally reach at 8.30pm, and find we are out of network coverage, which makes it difficult to let anyone know that we are at Bhoirymbong village in Shillong’s Ri Bhoi district.

Bad news: I do not get Akon’s “exclusive” interview, where I would have delved into his upcoming album and his recently released song ‘It’s a Beautiful Day’, which deviates from his usual sexualised lyrical compositions, explored his collaboration with Michael Jackson and even asked him why he thinks he didn’t win a Grammy even though his albums and songs have received five nominations at the Recording Academy’s award show. I would have gone beyond ‘Chammak Challo’, but I only could make it just in time to shake a leg to the only Indian song he has collaborated on. That is the good news.

When Akon gets on the stage, he owns the space, the crowd and the energy. He begins with ‘It’s a Beautiful Day’ and then picks up his songs from the early Noughties, starting with ‘Blame on Me’ and ‘The Sweetest Girl’ to ‘Smack That’ and ‘Dangerous’.

The mic goes off in the middle of one of his songs, but Akon walks around the stage, keeping his cool, and waits for the glitch to be resolved. A minute-long disruption is not met with silence. The audience cheers and Akon owns the stage again, saying, “Don’t worry, it happens. It happens, man! It’s okay. Well, I feel good because every day is a beautiful day, no matter what.” He then breaks into his 2004 hit ‘Ghetto’ and wings it for the rest of the show.

Then came the doyens of disco music, Boney M, on stage.

And, here is the better news: I do get an interview with Boney M, even though it is awkwardly taped between a photography session with their on-stage collaborators, The Shillong Choir, in the green room at nearly 1am.