September 11, 2006
ROCK4HOPE in Retrospective
This post is written with no intention to harm and without prejudice.
The ROCK4HOPE Charity Rock Concert for Yvonne Foong took place as planned last Saturday. Everything was great, except for the scarcity of the audience. The entire event + the preparation prior to the event was truly a great lesson for me. Learnt a lot – including the fact that the Bohemian Rhapsody sounded so much better when you listen to it live! Not from Metallica though, but from the acclaimed Deja Voodoo Spells. They are great!
Though I was not in the actually committee for the event, I could say that much that I have done to help only end up in dissappointment.
And here are some of them ..
* Nel from Astro Infozone (for Hitz.fm and Mix.fm) told me that they could not list the charity event on their Infozone announcement listing, merely because the “scope” was too small. The concert was only meant to raise fund for ONE person, and they can’t accept a scope as “insignificant” as that. Since when did saving one’s life is “insignificant”? There’s always a problem in our society – an event to raise fund for one person is insignificant, but a seminar on ‘how to make money’ is significant enough to be announced 3 times a day over the radio.
* An 8TV consultant spoke to me and assuring me that they will contact me and Yvonne on promoting the concert over the Quickie show. We even discussed about free-ticket-giveaways to callers who called in during the show. I was all excited for the meeting with the ever-beautiful Marion Counter and Adam C, but then we waited and waited and we never receive the call. And our subsequent calls to them were simply not answered. Oh well, maybe something happened on the way to Heaven ..
* I faxed the press release to The Star and they gladly listed in on their Metro Diary for only ONE day, and it was not even on the day of the event, it was about 3 weeks before. But maybe it helped. I received the next phone call from one of The Star reporter requesting me for Yvonne’s photo. She said that to highlight the event on the day itself, they would like to put up her photo in the middle of the Metro Diary, so that it would get more attention. Well, we thought it was great idea, and we gladly sent her the photo. And on 9th Sept, I opened the paper the first thing in the morning and saw the picture of Multimedia University MMU on the page, instead of Yvonne’s photo.
* We sold only 16 tickets to our friends. Including the tickets for me and my spouse, that would be 18 tickets. Many promised that they would turn up and purchase the tickets on the day itself, but none that we knew actually turned up.
In retrospective, I think most dissappointment were lead by false hope. We get dissappointed when others did not keep their words.
We also saw how only the needy would understand the needy.
* My cousin who earns 5 digit a month would not even buy one ticket.
* A friend who is in the progress of raising fund for his own father’s surgery – bought 5 tickets.
* I saw how most of those who came to the concert also supported Yvonne’s Heart4Hope products – some wanted to buy 2 t-shirts but they had only RM30. Some wanted both the earrings and the book but had to settle for only one of the two because they did not have much cash in their wallet.
It’s true how only the needy understand the needy. I remembered our little observation trip to Paris last year. We were warned about the pick-pockets who were mostly blacks. And we were warned that the riots around the suburbs of Paris were mostly committed by blacks. But when we arrived there lost in our limited vocabulary in French, the black teenagers showed us the way to our hotel. And as we walked along the backstreets of the city, we saw blacks giving food to the white beggars. How ironic. Paris was an eye opener for us as we saw the worst in ourselves -we are just hypocrites in our very own way.
So there goes the retrospective or post-mortem for the concert. The next charity concert that I’ll be attending would be the Heart to Heart Charity Concert for the Desa Amal Jireh, to be held near my workplace at Bukit Jalil Stadium, we will see Daniel Lee (i voted for him, and am convinced that it was my winning vote that made him win!), Jaclyn Victor and Misha Omar. I am not sure if this concert would see a bigger turnout. We shall see …
