Journalists covering a tragic event are often swept with the flow of other people’s emotions, often mediated by an overdose of messages crafted to overwhelm. It’s often challenging, in such situations, to locate the true colour of your emotions, and to draw that elusive line in the shifting sand between what you feel and what you are expected to feel. Inevitably, though, a journalist may choose to play the story as he or she wants the reader to feel it. If that amounts to betrayal — of the subjects in the story, the true nature of emotion, and of the real truth thereof — the writer shall forever be haunted by it. . . . → Read More: Two 9/11 stories
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In its May 1 issue, Tehelka has published my counter-point on the Indian rock scene – you can read it here. . . . → Read More: Tehelka hears us out My friends at Thermal And A Quarter and I read Inder Sidhu’s outcry against “the media’s hysterical coverage of Indian rock bands” (and before that, in 2008, Deepanjana Pal’s diatribe against Indian rock) in Tehelka with familiar feelings of resigned amusement and piquant regret. While Sidhu makes some pleasant noises and points available fingers at the usual suspects, he disappoints us by stating the obvious and therefore fails to offer us any fresh insight into what actually ails the rock scene. What ails the media we already know. Sidhu writes that the “vocabulary and context for rock criticism does not exist in India.” When was the last time you met an editor who condescended to carry a major story about any Westernised urban counterculture in India? When was the last time any self-respecting commentator (such as you, we hope) turned away from the clippings morgue and did some legwork to find out what’s really happening in India’s underground music scene? For instance, how do Indian bands approach songwriting, where do they learn to play their instruments, where do they rehearse? How do they finance gear, studio time and production efforts? What level of initiative does it take for a band to bag concert dates at Hard Rock Cafe or Blue Frog, or plan a five-city tour? Or to cut an album and market it independently? These realities offer story ideas for any journalist with a serious interest in writing about Indian rock. Perhaps Sidhu might want to consider exploring these areas instead of expending two thousand words on a subject he believes is not worth writing about. That’s laughable. Of course, we are aware these stories can’t be written within a week’s deadline but has any journalist cared to investigate the possibilities, or any editor dared to commission them? . . . → Read More: Don’t believe everything Tehelka says about Indian rock! I happened to be streaming Nina Simone’s haunting rendition of Strange Fruit when the news video of the policeman’s killing, which had been buffering, came alive. Both audio tracks played side by side and I was struck by the eerie similarity of their themes — it had a sort of roughhewn, impromptu resemblance to Simon & Garfunkel’s Silent Night-7 O’clock News. The age of original heartfelt protest songs in jazz, pop or rock has passed unlamented ever since we started counting Madonna, MJ, Eminem, the Black-Eyed Peas and Amy Winehouse among protest singers. Insidiously, Protest has become a marketing label, a genre if you like — which adds up to a nice new varnished shelf in a large music store somewhere before Punk and after Gospel. Most artists have realized that they have little to protest about but their own inconspicuousness. And their acts of protest are in truth about having a go at the fifteen lucre-encrusted minutes of fame that their voices, if sufficiently loud, would bring them. . . . → Read More: Protest and the Strange Fruit of Mistaken Identity The “fascinating article” (by Arjun S Ravi on MTV Iggy) that Cicatrix speaks of in Sepia Mutiny reads like ‘The Best of RSJ (1992-1999), with Notable Exceptions’. It’s all been documented before with elan and sincerity by Amit Saigal. Today, it’s dated. Because it casually ignores a significant slice of Indian rock history — the independent music scene in Bangalore, which was where the really surprising stuff started to emerge from the mothballed closet in the late 1990s. In businesspeak, this era was when Indian rock music sought to “differentiate” itself. Not through marketing strategy (a la Parikrama et al which still have nothing to offer the discerning music fan) but through inventiveness, performance and startling creative energy. Ergo, I am not sure if Ravi’s omission stems from ignorance (which is unforgivable) or from personal bias (which is charlatan). . . . → Read More: Why MTV can never befriend Indian indie rock  39 comments  bands, bangalore, journalism, music, musicians  alms for shanti, amit saigal, bangalore, bollywood, chakraview, Chennai, colourblind, delhi, Frank Zappa, galeej gurus, India, indian rock music, indie, indie bands, indie music, jupiter cafe, kolkata, krazzy 4, kryptos, laila rouass, MTV, MTV Iggy, Mumbai, myndsnare, plan b, ram sampath, rediff.com, RSJ, sepia mutiny, taaq, Thermal And A Quarter, uday benegal, zebediah plush If ever there is a social network whose deceptive simplicity bothers me, it is Craigslist. It seems to have terabytes of traffic, and a great deal going on — from real estate buying and selling (its original intended purpose) to blatant, brazen prostitution — minus any paint or gilt or trappings. No cool advertisements. No pimping . . . → Read More: Bastard Brainchild – Craig Newmark on Craigslist The media fatigue that followed 26/11 made many of us turn away from television forever. I am one of them. Even the remotest trust I had vested in television vanished forever. I don’t watch TV at all now, unless it’s hooked to a DVD player. Television is forgettable, but 26/11 isn’t. This video, forwarded to me by a friend, made me remember 26/11 all over again, without the voice of our favourite idiots in the box to tell us what to watch and which version to believe. Take heart – this is crushing stuff: http://vimeo.com/5409826 . . . → Read More: The 26/11 we must not forget On the evening of June 27, the wife and I watched Atul Kumar’s The Blue Mug at Ranga Shankara. While we thought it was entertaining on the whole, we wondered what the whole effing point was… Childhood’s End? Or Happy North Indian Mammary Memories? Or just haphazard, disjointed vignettes that entertain in a clunky Theatre of the Absurd way? We’re not sure. We still talk about it. Because we’re not serious, anally retentive theatre critics but regular arty-farty people with – between us – long hair, pierced noses, jobs to do and a kid to bring up. So, while we laughed our arses off at Ranvir Shorey’s excellent portrayal of the lunatic with no memory, and marvelled at Vinay Pathak’s ‘dance of the pervert’ with Sheeba Chadha, what we really saw was a series of cameos, well played but slightly threadbare. And what really got my goat was the stage design. Okay, we know Ranga Shankara has a smallish stage, but dangling giant blackboards from the rafters right in front was not the smartest design – some of us in the corners couldn’t see what was happening on stage. So, like a blind man at the movies, I had to follow Rajat Kapoor with my ears when he chose to linger at the back. But The Blue Mug was worth watching for Rs 200 a head. And thanks to the big names on the billboard, we sat in a packed house where at least two people in the row ahead of us were flatulent. I must tell the nice lady at the cafe not to serve samosas before the play starts. . . . → Read More: What we did not say about The Blue Mug Autorickshaw is a reasonably well-known Indo-Canadian Carnatic Jazz outfit. That’s a lot of hyphenated identities there, and (since I was employed with an Indian-American paper) I was primarily interested in the story of the singer Suba Sankaran, daughter of mridangam maestro Trichy Sankaran. Raised in Canada, she had trained in Carnatic and adapted her lovely, trained voice to jazz. Autorickshaw at that time was just one album old (the eponymous Autorickshaw – 2003), and the lineup was Sankaran, tabla player Ed Hanley, bassist Rich Brown and percussionist Patrick Graham. Since, they have cut two more albums – Four Higher (2004) and So the Journey Goes (2007). Four Higher, incidentally, is a play on the words ‘For Hire’ seen at the back of autorickshaws in India. I have with me Autorickshaw and a demo CD that Sankaran had sent me, and I still play both whenever I am allowed. Sankaran’s voice is not heavy on body (the way Susheela Raman’s does) but she handles her scales well and her phrasing is quite interesting. Some Carnatic purists I know, however, have been parsimonious with praise for it, but I like it nonetheless. As for the domain of jazz, I’m not sure where exactly Autorickshaw the band fits in. Or how their journey has placed them on the global canvas. Yes, they have a whole lot of gigs lined up, and that’s always nice for any band. I observed, with some disappointment, that Sankaran’s vocals have not matured with the music as much as I would have expected them to. I thought the title track of So the Journey Goes was rather tedious. But for memory’s sake, I shall treasure the early Autorickshaw I knew. Thumbing through my archives the other night, I came across an interview that never made it to print, or the web. The responses are unabridged, and I have retained Suba’s spellings for Carnatic (Karnatak) and mridangam (mrdangam) among other idiosyncrasies. The second part of the interview iss more about Suba the artist, and some questions may seem pedestrian. But hey, I’m no arty-farticulate music critic! . . . → Read More: Suba Sankaran’s Autorickshaw – circa 2004 On the occasion of India’s Independence Day here are two links from The Weekly Independent, a Pakistani paper. The force of truth THE truth about Mohammad Ali Jinnah is that his political ideology developed and matured in a gradual and complex way over fifty . . . → Read More: Views from across the border |
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