Daddy Diaries 9 -The Taylor Swift Fascination

A spur-of-the-moment decision becomes a night to remember and leads me to turning into a Swiftie dad

“Ay, dadda, we want see a Taylor Swift concert!” my Swift-obsessed Swifties said in unison one day when I returned from work. They are 8 and 9.5 years old. Their bedroom walls have handmade posters of the star, they’ve painted T-shirts with her quotes on it, they weave bracelets with names of her songs, and listen to her music all day long. Apart from every single song from every single album, they know where she was born in 1989, what her birthweight was, how many boyfriends she’s had, and at what temperature she soaks her almonds. I don’t remember being this bewitched by any celebrity in my childhood as these girls are. I’ve been a fan of The Beatles, Elvis, and Michael Jackson all my life but with none of this madness.

“Let’s see when she’s coming to India,” I told them, as I settled onto the couch with both of them atop me, searching for concert dates. “152 shows in 54 cities… and not a single one in India,” I said, looking at their sulking faces. “But,” I added, “the closest concerts to us are in Singapore… in two weeks!” We’d been planning to holiday there for the longest time, and the dates of the show coincided with their spring break in the first week of March. I clicked on the link to buy tickets, and to my surprise, everything was sold out. She had 6 shows over 8 days in Singapore alone, in a stadium with the capacity to seat 60,000 people, and all of them were sold out. And all the tickets for all her shows for the rest of the year across the world were sold out. Either this is some sort of scam or this girl really is famous, I thought to myself. I happened to find out later that it was the latter.

“Let’s go to Singapore,” I told my girls. “Yeah!” they jumped at the thought. “We’ll stand outside the stadium and ask for extra tickets; someone might sell them in black,” I reminisced. They stuck out their tongues, knowing that this wouldn’t happen, but I fully remember buying tickets in black for DDLJ and so many other movies. The 90s were so much fun. I later found out there were some sites selling resale Taylor Swift tickets and managed to source them out through a friend. We booked our tickets, packed our bags, and got onto a plane 2 weeks later to the cleanest country in the world – where a few days into the trip, my elder daughter dropped an ice cream cone on the floor but instantly picked it up and started lapping it up.

“These few miles of road can be immediately converted into an emergency landing for airplanes,” the taxi driver told us as we zipped off from the airport into the city on a runway. “Everything is booked in the city because of Taylor Swift,” he said, pointing to the National Stadium in the distance where she was performing the first of her six shows that week. I later heard – and, of course, much of this is hearsay – that she was paid an additional 3 million dollars a show to exclusively perform in Singapore out of all the South East Asian countries. We checked into a hotel on the bustling Orchard Road, whose lobby was filled with Asians who were a combination of over and underdressed returning from one of the concerts. “How was it?” I asked some of them. “Oh my god… it was soooo good la!” they screamed. This is going to be fun, I thought to myself.

We spent the first two days doing touristy things like visiting Sentosa Island and Universal Studios, where my younger one almost got run over by Kung Fu Panda. On the day of the show, the two of them spent the afternoon making more bracelets with her song names beaded into them. People exchange these at the concert and it’s a big deal. To skip the madness of the lines, we decided we’d miss the opening act, so just before Taylor was about to perform, we sauntered into the stadium amidst the loudest roar I’ve ever heard in a sports arena – and I was present at Wankhede when India won the World Cup in 2011! When she walked onto that stage to the beat of a countdown timer going from 10 to 0, the crowd went berserk. Not only teenage girls but grown men – uncles like me – who were adorned in bracelets from wrist to elbow, were weeping with joy on seeing this 34-year-old look in their direction from half a mile away.

And when she started to sing, it was one hell of a party. The crowd went ballistic, waving their arms, their wrist bands changing colour – every fluorescent hue – at every song. Over the next 3 hours and 15 minutes, she sang 45 songs with over a dozen costume changes. I knew only four songs, but I was in awe. She played the piano, strummed the guitar, sang every song live, and danced her butt off to an eclectic array of sounds and lights and a production that was stellar. The agility of the background dancers, the quality of the set design, and the magnitude of the production was something only dreams are made of. My girls were thrilled to bits dancing to every song they knew, with their idol grooving in the same room. At the end, 60,000 people exited the stadium in bliss and dispersed into oblivion amidst a sudden downpour of torrential rain.

We spent a few more days walking around the city, visiting the zoo, and going on a night safari. We had lunch atop Marina Bay Sands and stimulated our other senses at the art and science museum next door. We ate our last meal of the trip with a bunch of friends at the famous Lau Pa Sat open-air food court, where we bumped into some other friends from Mumbai who were also there to see the concert. It turns out we weren’t the only crazy ones.

We returned to Mumbai and saw three and half hours of The Eras Tour concert film on Disney+ Hotstar, which is the recording of the entire concert up close and free. The little one then had a Taylor Swift-themed birthday party at home, where the cake had all the Taylor Swift album covers on it. We’ve unofficially adopted Taylor Swift. When I was young, it was aapro Freddy. Now, it’s aapri Tehmina.