It’s easy to see what everyone will do to remember 26/11 – the idiots in the box will run “specials” ad nauseam and people will take out rallies and candlelit processions. But what about the terror that ensued after 26/11 – the pub attacks on women by the Sri Rama Sene? The quick blood of the Marathi manoos against fellow-citizens in Maharashtra? And what shall we do with all those luminaries named in the Liberhan Report?
Seriously, don’t we have to redefine what constitutes terrorism before we figure out who is a terrorist? 26/11, our very own desi version of 9/11, offers us just that opportunity – to make no distinctions in the war against terror. To unseat the terrorists in power, and to deal terrorism in every form a body blow.
26/11 is not an anniversary to remember terror. It’s an opportunity to never allow ourselves to be shamed by it, in any form.
Game?
Disclaimer: I write for Thermal And A Quarter. But despite my own leanings, I cannot take seriously any article on the Indian rock music scene that dwells in the era of imitative cover performances, or performances of so-called originals that are so totally “inspired” by popular covers that they are no different from them at all. That stuff is so ten years ago. Maybe twenty. Without any vintage value whatsoever.
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).
Thermal And A Quarter, as those who know their Indian indie scene know, began this revolution by playing entire three-hour sets comprising only originals — as early as 1999. No Indian band, repeat, no Indian band (save some in that fantastic cultural pocket — the Northeast) was doing that then. One other band that did it explosively — and I was witness to their memorable show at Madras Christian College’s Deep Woods in 1996 — was (then not-yet-Mumbai’s) Chakraview (with Dhruv Ghanekar on some serious gizmo-led guitar).
Perhaps Ravi also might want to remember that Laila Rouass-starring black-and-white music video, Colourblind, by the Mumbai band of the same name (the duo of Ram Sampath and Siddharth Achrekar). It was a brilliant new statement (very indie) and added a dimension to Indian rock that did not hitherto exist (or last). Sampath (now a composer for films and famous for his copyright victory over the Roshans for copying the music of Krazzy 4) told me off the record when I interviewed him (about Ram Madhvani’s Let’s Talk for Rediff.com in December 2002) that Colourblind “had not been viable”.
Viability has always been the gradient against which Indian indie rock has laboured. Indus Creed, after showing us the light, disappointed us by disbanding and resurfacing again as Alms for Shanti, with an eponymous album that was released both in English and Hindi (Kashmakash, Free Spirit, 2001). Alms for Shanti, with a name that sounded like it had been coined by an armchair Indologist at the University of Hawaii, plays the club circuit in New York where they have established themselves as export-reject exotics. Although singer Uday Benegal cribbed about the sleaze in the music industry as an aside during an interview with Rediff.com in 2002, he also told me this: “We went West because we were disillusioned with the East. Because the music we were doing at that time had absolutely no place here. Not that we were seeking salvation in the West. We wanted to go ahead with the music we make and look for the audience in the West.”
That’s one way to go, but if you know the audience to be here you have to be loyal to it. It must be remembered that around the same time that Alms for Shanti announced their album to a crowd of wine-sipping and tikka-nibbling celebs at a swank Tardeo lounge bar, a lot of bands that had been either influenced by TAAQ or shared the same struggle emerged from Bangalore — Kryptos, Myndsnare, Galeej Gurus, Zebediah Plush… And I am not even talking in any detail about the metal scene (which, being loud enough as it is, deserves an altogether different celebratory writeup amid a full-flowing headbangathon at Styx).
That TAAQ (still an unsigned band) was not from Bollywood-besotted Mumbai or Hindi-mein-gao-yaar Delhi or still-smoking-the-Sixties Kolkata was really what went against them when they started. Or the fact that their music was a leap year ahead of the public imagination — I mean, how many Benadryl-swillers orgasming in the moshpit had actually heard of (let alone heard) Steely Dan and Pat Metheny, or even imagined that they could influence an Indian band’s sound? The few critics of this counterculture — jealous jilted lovers of it mostly — judged the music by a myopic yardstick: the done-to-death genres of metal and dinosaur rock.
With Jupiter Cafe (2002), TAAQ’s second album, Bangalore shot into the limelight. It continued with Plan B (2004), the first album from India to be distributed with a custom Creative Commons-like license. These, inarguably, were milestones in Indian rock. Indie media (Indiecision, Split, RadioVerve… hell, even the un-indie Rolling Stone) acknowledged and celebrated them. MTV, which has always fed off the now happily moribund record industry (recently resuscitated by MJ’s passing) and now mooches off Bollywood to survive in the subcontinent, has no authority to comment on the indie scene. In the two fitful decades of Indian rock, MTV has neither recognised nor supported the indie movement. And to pay lip service to it now, with a limp biscuit such as this, is both embarrassing and shameful.
As the man who named his daughter Moon Unit said: “In the fight between you and the world, back the world.”
Part of this rant was originally posted as a comment on the muchly admired Sepia Mutiny
Photo: TAAQ from the back by SlickThief
“I have been driven to writing by sheer ineptitude. I wanted to write, of course, always. I did a certain amount of stuff but I couldn’t get anything published— it was too bad. I think writers today learn so much more quickly. I mean, I could no more write as well at their age than fly.”
- Lawrence Durrell to the Paris Review, April 23, 1959
As a fairly meaty head on the 1996 Christ College totem pole, I had the good fortune to be father-in-law figure to a bunch of people infinitely more promising and talented than my not-so-humble self. Among the other cultural pursuits of our time (anathema, always, to our saffron-tinted moral police), we grew up admiring a host of homegrown bands — Crimson Storm, Gangamma’s Pleasure, Vulcan Haze, War Den and, from an amused distance, Millennium. Of the great bands on the assembly line at that time, perhaps the only intact survivors are Thermal And A Quarter and Galeej Gurus.
There was another band I admired immensely. It was young, brash, exotic, intelligent, fast and full of a dangerous vitality that was both exhilarating and terrifying. And best of all, its members were from Christ College, following in the footsteps of TAAQ and the Gurus.
Zebediah Plush - hair, vim, verve anda trickle of oomph
I lived far removed from the action, in Mumbai, for most of Bangalore’s big rock season between 2001 and 2005. Ergo, I missed out (in person) on the seminal moments in Bangalore’s rock history — Thermal And A Quarter’s Jupiter Cafe (2002) and Plan B (2004) being the only milestones in which I had played a hand. But the boys (and girl) of Zebediah Plush visited Mumbai one night for a performance at a pub in Powai.
A local Mumbai band, a crowd favourite judging by the applause they got, had just warmed the stage. There was hardly any elbow room in there by the time Plush went up and I began to get a little nervous, hoping that the crowd would stay on. Frankly, I was there to cheer my home band in an indulgent avuncular fashion, and not because I expected much of them.
Hair guitar in three flavours - Jitu, Anand and Hari
But what sheer joy it was to watch them! In the limelight, these snarky kids seemed to sprout an otherworldly persona — complete with vim, verve, pizazz and hair. They adrenalized with their brand of intelligent, sophisticated music and a performance so riveting that soon, nearly everyone in that partisan Mumbai metal crowd had been won over.
Just when Bangalore, and other parts of the world that had earned a chance to experience them, had grown immensely fond of this lovable brat pack, Zebediah Plush, like those that marry too young, followed its destiny to disband, but sans acrimony or bad blood. After bringing out one studio album, Afterlaughs (2005), the members of Plush decided it was time to go their separate ways — to university, into careers, and perhaps even to explore oblivion. But their way of going away was not to peter out but to explode, supernova-esque, in one last gasp of glory.
Andy - Unforgettable Plush bassist
On June 30, 2005, Plush invited its fans to a concert alongside Thermal And A Quarter at Alliance Francaise de Bangalore. It was dubbed — with characteristic Plush tongue-in-cheekness — The Last Laugh. And there, in its own tumultuous way, Zebediah Plush announced the end of a dream chase.
Another of Bangalore’s infamous history-makers had walked into a sunset of its own making. And through the years, despite MySpace and Last.fm, Plush’s music has been found and lost and lost again in our great cyber archive.
Arfaaz - singing drummer
Zebediah Plush were:
Arfaaz Kagalwala – Drums, vocals
Anand Varghese – Guitars, vocals
Avijit Michael – Keyboards
Anindita Gupta – Bass
Hari Adivarekar – Vocals
All pictures from Zebediah Plush’s Facebook page
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 of user-generated content (which is all it has), no add-on applications. No shit. No, wait, there’s lots of that. In fact, Craigslist seems to be a bloody dangerous place — it’s the darkest alley of the Internet where even the notion of online safety is an absolute dud.
What seems to bother most web-watchers (including the writer of this Wired article) is that the privately held Craigslist isn’t doing anything with its popularity or moving on the next generation of technology. Or whatever.
Craig Newmark, Craigslist’s founder, is no control freak. But he is a geek (In fact, the Wired article describes him as “public-spirited and mild-mannered, politically liberal and socially awkward”) — a geek of the kind that inherits the earth when all is done with.
Newmark has been working hard to extend the influence of his worldview. His public pronouncements have the delighted yet apologetic tone of a man who has stumbled on a secret hiding in plain sight and who finds it embarrassingly necessary to point out something that should long have been obvious. He seems to have discovered a new way to run a business. He suspects that it may be the right way to run the world.
But there is something endearing about the Internet’s last freedom fighter – one who stands for user anonymity like no one else does:
When he talks, he calls upon a repertoire of conversational gambits he has been collecting forever, and he has a selection of sound effects on his mobile phone, such as a cymbal crash, that he can trigger to make it clear he is joking. When people misunderstand him, he doesn’t get upset. “I’m the Forrest Gump of the Internet,” he says. He loves customer service. “I’ll only be doing this as long as I live,” he says. He taps his phone, triggering a ghostly whaaahahaha. “And after that, who knows?”
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality
- Emily Dickinson
The media fatigue that followed 26/11 made many of us turn away from television forever. I am one of those. Even the remotest trust I had vested in television has vanished. I don’t watch TV at all now, unless it’s hooked to a DVD player.
Television may be forgettable, but 26/11 isn’t. This video, forwarded to me by a friend, made me remember 26/11 all over again, without the voices of our favourite idiots in the box to tell us what to watch and which version to believe.
Take heart – this is crushing stuff.
I can’t stand journalists who don’t take notes. I can’t stand journalists who pretend to listen. And I hate them even more if they work for Mid-Day.
So, if you know this hack, put a stiletto in her back for me.
But first, the background.
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 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.
Well, so we milled around with the other voyeurs after the play, hoping to see how the dramatis personae kept up without their makeup. And we did.
It’s sad, but despite Rajat Kapoor’s string of subsequent achievements, I always remember him for the paedophile that he played in Monsoon Wedding. Konkona Sen Sharma, the missus and I agreed, was a lot more personable in person than the extreme close-ups we’ve been used to seeing of her mug, blue or otherwise, most recently in Luck by Chance. Ranvir, I think, has a new camera. And will someone in the know tell us: Is Vinay Pathak gay or just a Bombaywallah with an incipient ponytail and a slick shoulder bag?
On our way out, we were stopped by a young woman in an autorickshaw (for a moment, my mind drifted back to an unnerving memory of being accosted by a nubile nocturnal professional on Juhu-Tara Link Road in Mumbai many years ago). It was safe to talk to this woman, we presumed, when she introduced herself as a journalist. She was in a desperate hurry to get some quotes, it seemed. Driving back, I told my wife that we were going to be horribly misquoted because the chick had no Dictaphone or suchlike recording device. Neither was she taking notes, besides our names and… ahem, our ages (she got them right for the most part).
In hindsight, it may have been safer to talk to a nocturnal professional.
Our names have since appeared in Mid-Day, linked to statements that we never uttered. The journalist quotes me as saying: “What was very encouraging was the actors gave each other space and the celebrities in the play did not swallow the rest. It was a display of healthy team spirit.”
Healthy team spirit?! What do you take me for – an HR manager?!
Balderdash!
What I said was that the play’s denouement was an attempted mindfuck. I can understand the reluctance of a journalist to bowdlerise a semi-expletive, but my hunch is that Ms Hack didn’t know what denouement meant, or how to spell it.
As for my wife, she was interviewed in my presence and I’m certain she said nothing of the sort. When I showed her this article she said: “This has to be some cosmic conspiracy, or a divine message that is incomprehensible!”
I’m relieved that Ms Tanu Kulkarni wasn’t quoting us as eyewitnesses to a rape or murder or something.
In Kodungallur and Latur and Dibrugarh, they don’t know of Van Halen or U2, Beyonce or Bobby McFerrin, Bob Dylan or John McLaughlin, John Denver or Kid Rock. Heck, they don’t even know the Beatles.
But they know Michael Jackson. And, as of this morning on this side of the world, they know he is dead.
It is the day we were afraid to wait for. It is the day we thought would never come. Or if it did, that it would go away without bothering us.
It is the day the music died.
It is the day the Internet almost died.
It is the day that has completely washed away the tears that are being wept for Farrah Fawcett.
Hacks have been ready with MJ’s obit for nearly a decade. Which explains why the ones you read in The New York Times and The Washington Post are so meaty. All they needed to add was a paragraph on the day and time of his death, and whisk up a soapy ending.
Around the world, radio stations have not stopped playing MJ since the news of his death. Even in death, it is a festival like never before for the pop icon who blurred the boundaries of everything society has struggled to define demographically – gender, colour, religion, age, crime, morality…
He was perhaps the most hunted celebrity of all time – in fact he demonstrated, with his life, the glory and the anguish of celebrity. He was condemned to enjoy no private moments – his life was the original Truman Show.
But, because he is gone, we shall not remember MJ for his foibles – for the black skin turned white by wilful vitiligo, for the prosthetic nose that slipped off during an interview with one of many media vampires, for his uncomfortable marriages and his alleged paedophilia, or for his escapades around Bahrain in a burqa. Those shenanigans will soon be forgotten, for MJ was a rarity among celebrities – he was the soul of innocence, a child all the way. As NYT put it, he was “the Peter Pan of pop music.” It is only a matter of technicality that he died at 50.
And, most of all, we will remember him for his music. And for being a performer without parallel or peer in mediated history. Proof, apart from everything else in his life, lies in the musical legacy he leaves behind – ten albums, of which six were bestsellers from the moment they hit the shelves.
Many a child growing up in the 1980s has attempted the moonwalk, or the patented anti-gravity lean he used in the music video for Smooth Criminal, and blanched at the urban legend that Jackson broke a few ribs just dancing. And many of us, now with more grey hair showing than Jackson ever did, may still feel a hot flash of adolescent adrenalin coursing through our tired veins when we listen to Thriller, or Bad, or Beat It.
As with the great legends of music who never die, Michael Jackson shall live on.
MJ can never be mourned, only celebrated. May he go in grace.
And we, for our part, shall remember the time when we fell in love.
I shall leave you with one of my favourite MJ videos – Dirty Diana. I love the range of emotion and especially the way MJ, equally wily as an impish child and dangerously effeminate as a dominatrix, overpowers the otherwise imposing spectacle of the metal guitar player.
When I was growing up, Whitefield was to Bangalore as Hubli is to Dharwad. Or Secunderabad is to Hyderabad. Or something like that.
It wasn’t exactly white, yes, but it had touches of off-white and it was the city’s backwoods where you could go to hear the living language of the Anglo-Indians. Stuff you get to hear these days only from Chamarajpet Charles.
For me, as a child returning from summer vacations in Kerala, Whitefield was a railway station stop that announced, with utter and irredeemable finality, that Bangalore was 15 minutes away. The end of holidays and the woeful beginning of school.
When I started going to college, a summer job collecting market data for a logistics company took me to Whitefield. Thanks to a bad stomach the previous night, I had started the day with a healthy upheaval of my stomach contents into the sink. My mouth still tasted of bile when I reached Whitefield at about 11. I was hungry and thirsty.
It was a nice breezy summer’s day quite incomparable, despite Shakespeare, to the summer days we endure now. A little zero-watt bulb went off in my head and pointed me to RR bar and restaurant, in the shade of a banyan tree. It was a spare little place with wooden benches and tables made of planks. But the floors had been swept and mopped and the wash basin where I rinsed my hands was clean.
The company gave me a daily food allowance and I had been smart enough to save some over the weekend. I had with me enough for a full saapaad and some tipple. It was only a quarter past eleven but the beer looked tempting. So I went ahead and ordered a bottle of Kingfisher and some rotis with chicken curry.
On an empty, antibiotic-addled stomach, beer can do funny things. And by the time the rotis arrived, I had trouble locating them on my table. To boot, the three farmers who were enjoying their beers at the next table looked like distant ghostly apparitions of horsemen. I blinked, but the vista wouldn’t fade. In a bold show of dignity, I felt my way to the wash basin, anointing the white-washed walls with a trail of brown curry. My reflection in the mirror left me little doubt that everybody present at RR that afternoon knew I was wasted. On a bottle of beer!
When I recounted this episode to my friend Gautam Raja, he told me that RR stood for ‘Roaring Rectum’. True enough, that evening’s session in the john had been haemorrhoid-inflating.
I came to know Whitefield better thanks to Gautam, who has been a denizen of this suburb for as long as his memory permits him to remember. And it was delightful to see his own little stab at the wayward “development” of Whitefield by the land sharks in Time Out Bengaluru.
“When I was a little monkey,” he writes, “I’d cycle all over Whitefield and it was green and idyllic in a way that bores one to tears when written about, so I’ll spare you.”
And, when I think of the Whitefield my daughter will never see as I did, I can’t fight the tears myself.
Here’s more:
The closer you ride to Whitefield though, the more the area is best appreciated on winter mornings when the temperature is low and the landscape gently softened by mist. Go through a few hours later, and what you thought was a babbling brook is now Dysentery’s Creek, the wholesome breeze is more like broken wind, and you finally know that the perfume that follows you around after your morning ride is Channel No. 5 – the eau de toilets spray. How sad and funny that one of the first signs of affluence is effluence. That, and a house that looks like a three-storey pista cake.
