Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, 8 pm on a Saturday night. For close to two hours, the field throbbed with the kind of energy only a Punjabi artist can produce in Dilwalon ki Dilli. Tens of thousands of voices rose together as Karan Aujla ran through a setlist that barely let the momentum drop. Every beat landed, every hook was met with a roar, and every pause only made the crowd louder.

Wristbands flickered across the night like scattered stars, strangers shouted lyrics shoulder to shoulder, and the atmosphere had that rare, electric feeling when an artist and audience seem perfectly in sync. By every measure that matters at a concert, the show was a banger.

Aujla was sharp, confident and fully in control of a massive crowd that knew exactly why it had come. The performance didn’t drag, the songs hit one after another, and for those two hours, the music did what good live music always does—turn thousands of fans into one collective voice.

If anything, the night proved just how enormous the appetite for live music in India has become. Pulling a crowd of over 70,000 and delivering on every front—stage, sound, fireworks, vibes—in a picky city like Delhi is no joke.

But somewhere beyond the lights and speakers, another reality was quietly unfolding—at the barricades, along the walkways, and eventually on the roads outside the venue. Concerts are supposed to be chaotic; nobody expects them to be comfortable. What they shouldn’t be is disorganised.

And as the night went on, it became harder to ignore the fact that while the music industry in India has learned how to pull stadium-sized crowds, the systems around those crowds are still figuring out what to do with them.

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For an absolute Aujla-paglu, I never anticipated that anything would be able to put me off from the experience of seeing him live. However, for all the energy on stage, being part of the crowd often felt like navigating an obstacle course.

At the start of the concert, dozens of people pushed past gates and barricades—being held by just a few security personnel—squeezing forward with little regard for those around them. In the crush, elbows dug into ribs and shoulders knocked into strangers who had nowhere to step aside.

Police personnel stationed near the barriers tried to hold the line, but arguments broke out and the crowd kept swelling forward in waves. It wasn’t the usual jostling you expect at a packed concert; it felt closer to a slow, collective push where everyone was trying to claim a slightly better view.

Rules inside the venue seemed just as negotiable. Cigarette kiosks were set up inside what was officially a non-smoking venue. Warnings to throw out anyone who was smoking rarely lasted long. A quiet conversation, a discreet exchange of cash, and the rule seemed to disappear as quickly as it had appeared. The system worked less like enforcement and more like negotiation.

Then there was the field itself. For an event that drew tens of thousands of people, the absence of something as basic as dustbins was hard to miss. Plastic cups, food wrappers, and empty bottles began collecting on the ground as the night went on, until the open field slowly turned into a carpet of trash.

The chaos didn’t stop when the last song ended. Once the crowd began to spill out, the surrounding roads quickly clogged into a slow-moving gridlock. For a concert that wrapped up around 10 pm and was barely 8 km from home, the journey back stretched to nearly two and a half hours—a reminder that in Delhi, sometimes getting out of the concert is harder than getting into it.

If Delhi’s chaos unfolded in the crowd, Mumbai’s played out under the sun. Clips from the Mumbai stop of Karan Aujla’s tour began circulating online soon after the concert, and the backlash was hard to miss. Unlike the evening show in Delhi, this one was scheduled as a day concert in March—a detail that might sound trivial until you remember what a Mumbai afternoon feels like in an open ground packed with thousands of people.

Videos showed long queues forming around water counters, with several attendees complaining that water was being sold at inflated prices and that there was no accessible free drinking water for the general crowd. Shade, too, appeared unevenly distributed. While VIP sections had better cover and amenities, large parts of the general admission area stood exposed to the afternoon heat.

Some clips on social media showed fans slumped by the barricades, visibly dehydrated and dizzy due to the scorching heat—moments that quickly triggered criticism online about basic safety planning at large-scale outdoor events. At concerts of this scale, water and shade are not luxuries. They are crowd safety measures.

The details may differ between cities, but the pattern feels familiar. In Delhi, the struggle was managing the sheer movement of the crowd. In Mumbai, it was anticipating what that crowd might need in the first place. Together, the two concerts reveal the same underlying problem: India’s appetite for massive live shows has grown rapidly, but the planning around those shows is still trying to catch up.

What the concerts ultimately revealed is a mismatch between scale and systems. India’s live music scene has grown dramatically in the past few years. Artists like Karan Aujla can pull crowds that rival stadium tours anywhere in the world, and fans are clearly willing to show up in massive numbers. The appetite for live music is no longer in question.

What remains uncertain is whether the ecosystem around these events is prepared for the scale. Crowd dispersal, transport coordination, waste management, safety planning—the unglamorous logistics that make large gatherings function—often appear like afterthoughts rather than priorities. And it isn’t just organisers who bear responsibility. Civic behaviour, too, plays a role in how these spaces function once the gates open.

India doesn’t lack audiences for global-scale concerts. What it still needs is a concert culture –from planning to policing to public behaviour—that can handle the crowds it so enthusiastically gathers.