When Ananya Joshi, 14, read about Zayn Malik’s departure from One Direction last week, she couldn’t stop crying.
But when the initial shock had faded, the hard-core Directioner – as followers of the band call themselves – tweeted to thousands of fellow fans. She asked those going to the group’s On the Road Again Tour gig at The Sevens Stadium on Saturday to do something special as a tribute to the former member of Britain’s biggest boy band.
The teenager from Dubai is no stranger to motivating the band’s devoted following – she launched the 1D Dubai Fan Project a few months ago, gaining traction on social media, including Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook, thanks to her unwavering loyalty.
"Followers of the project have decided to show our love for Zayn by raising pictures of him when the boys sing Story of My Life," says Ananya.
As part of the fan project, Ananya had already been collaborating with a Directioner in Saudi Arabia to rally other concertgoers and coordinate how they would show solidarity on “1D-day”, even before Zayn’s departure.
“We started this project shortly after the tickets went on sale,” says Joshi. “Ten girls from Europe and Middle East have committed to spreading the word, but it has mainly been me and Anna from Saudi who started this.”
Ananya discovered the band when she was browsing channels one night and heard Little Things playing on the radio. That, she says, was a "turning point" in her life. Her bedroom is a shrine dedicated to 1D, with posters plastered on the walls, cut-outs and calendars on her desk and bedsheets with the singers' faces on them. She camped for hours outside Virgin Megastore last year to get her hands on a pair of Platinum tickets for their concert and has visited The Sevens Stadium every weekend since to "admire" the venue where they will be performing on Saturday, April 4. She and the friends she has made through the fan project have decided on a neon theme and are asking fans to wear or carry neon colours to the concert on Saturday. So far, Ananya says, thousands have pledged their support.
Fans holding up mobile phones to light up the concert while a band sings is a signature feature at 1D concerts all over the world – but the fan project members in Dubai plan to take it one step further.
“We will hold neon cloud cutouts with lyrics or sayings in blue, red and green during the concert,” says Ananya.
"We are also asking fans to carry different-coloured torch lights and will be shining a different light for every song they sing. For example, during the song Where Do Broken Hearts Go we want to hold up red neon lights."
The girls hosted a meetup at The Dubai Mall this month and distributed more than 400 posters to visitors. “We all pitched in to print copies of these posters that have come from everywhere, such as Turkey, the UK and Saudi Arabia. We are expecting another 4,000 posters that we will be giving out at another meetup before the concert and during the event, as well.”
For Ananya, the project is a way of “appreciating all that the boys have done for us in the past four years”.
“This is our way of giving back,” she says. “Every concert of theirs is special and each performance unique. We want to show them how much we love their work and thank them.”
Fans such as Ananya all over the world have been tracking the band members – Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson and the now-departed Zayn Malik – since they rose to fame after finishing third on the British reality-TV music competition The X Factor in 2010.
“I’ve met so many amazing people – online and offline – because of them,” says Ananya.
“We talk about the most silly things, like if we ever go to a concert what poster will we be holding up, who our favourite boy is, what the latest gossip is on them. I relate to these fans and together we are so much better.”
She says she still remembers the first time she heard their voices.
“I heard it when I was about to sleep and I don’t know why, but it made me cry,” she says. “I felt this pull and knew this was what was missing in my life. The boys were what I needed. It made me a completely different person.”
Ananya says her parents put the obsession down to a teenage phase.
“I’m going to prove them wrong,” she says. “It’s not a phase and I will love them even when I’m old.”
Follow the 1D Dubai Fan Project on Twitter @iluvsimplicity
aahmed@thenational.ae
