Rocking in the Free World

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Dear Reader, this column is twice its usual size because it will be my last one for the magazine that I have been writing in for the past four and a half years. The column in itself has been around for a little over two years now and I feel bad about not being able to write it anymore, but the reasons for the choices I have made will be clearer as you read ahead.

Firstly, I must apologize to all of you for last month’s column that had stuff about Metallica in it. It was written in a rush and when I sent it to Andrew, I knew that I had done a shoddy job. Andrew himself says very little to praise or criticize my work, but even he admitted that I’d sent across pure trash in the guise of a column. If I had very little fun writing it, I can’t imagine how much less fun you’d have had if you tried reading it.

It is nice to be self-confident and know how good you are or can be, but I think self-awareness is a far more important trait. Acknowledging that you’ve done something bad and then trying to remedy it is as vital as a self-congratulatory smug expression you’d wear following a job well done.

When I sat through thinking of why the column was as shoddy as it was, I realized that I’d spent enough time writing here and that it was finally time to look ahead and try out something new and different. Something challenging and something that will thrill me to bits and help me get out of my comfort zone.

It is time to move my feet to the rhythm of a different beat.

And yes, sometimes clichés are the best way to express oneself.

My association with Rock Street Journal began way back in early 2007 when I sent in a draft piece that seemed to do the trick and Anupam Roy replied in an email saying, “Congratulations, you’re our new Bangalore correspondent.”

I then began by writing pieces ad nauseum and sending in stuff on a continuous basis. The thrill of having a by-line at the end of each piece never seemed to fade and has become a good feeling that someone that loves to write craves as a means of self-validation.

I’d started off by writing a ‘new noise’ piece on Extinct Reflections and thereafter, interviewed and covered live performances by most of the Bangalore-based bands. I know I’ve missed out on quite a few deserving bands, but I’d like to attribute that omission to a deadly combination of sloth and of having to work a full time job, rather than as a result of apathy, indifference or disrespect.

A good friend of mine, Christian Grönroos once told me this in 2006, “Every single individual that you come across in your life will change you in some way or the other.” His words continue to be true to this day. The impact that people have can be different depending on how much you like / dislike them or based on how much time you spend with them.

Having been exposed primarily to engineering and B-school students in my student life, and then continuing to be friends with a vast number of them as they went on towards their chosen professions, I have had an opportunity to interact and understand how these highly analytical, mostly organized people are wired.

Musicians, artists, photographers and others that have a propensity towards things more art-oriented and pursuits more creative tend to think differently and it is this approach that has made me more aware, if not wiser than I would have otherwise been.

I’m grateful for the vast number of people that I have had a chance to meet when I have been moonlighting as a music journalist. Artists, artist managers, photographers, fans, well-wishers, event managers, sound engineers, advertisers and of course, other music journalists would be part of that list.

I’ve had a chance to involve myself in the music scene in Bangalore, Chennai (during Saarang for two consecutive years), Hyderabad (during my one year stint there) and Delhi (in a highly limited capacity by visiting the magazine office regularly and attending the odd gig here and there).

I figured that if this were a video or a reality TV show from which I was making an exit, there’d be a clip that would be playing some soft shady music and showing me as I went about my various list of activities in slow motion until there was a final clip of me walking away, boarding a cab and waving cheerily at the camera before the tinted window went up and the car sped away into the distance.

My only cover story till date has been the epic interview with Opeth and the associated coverage that I had put in for Saarang 2009. Spending 45 minutes talking to Akerfeldt and Mendez and getting pictures with them with our magazines in hand was an awesome feeling. Transcribing the interview, watching them live perform live a day after a killer competition followed by the other general shenanigans that one experienced with the good old boys from bands such as Inner Sanctum, Escher’s Knot, Eccentric Pendulum, Theorized, Abandoned Agony and the like made me like my music journalist job more than my regular day job by many orders of magnitude.

Pub rock fests held in Bangalore showed me the high pressure situations that the events team worked in and dealt with on a continued basis. What started off purely as am Allahabad-based rock magazine has been extended to incorporate a series of continued annual events including our flagship Great Indian Rock festival and other festivals cutting across various genres and the events team’s annual calendar is filled as a result. Sid, Vibhu and Anoop have been insane and insanely fun to work and hang out with.

The other great times I have had have been while attending and covering various concerts including but not limited to the ones featuring Iron Maiden, Aerosmith, Jethro Tull and Anouskha Shankar and The Scorpions to name a few.

There’s quite a few behind the scenes equivalent situations that I have encountered that haven’t, mercifully made it to the pages of the magazine, but in the interest of saying goodbye, I feel that it needs to be documented for posterity in some form or the other.

There have been two occasions when I have been drunk out of my wits and I would’ve, in an attempt to be honest, mentioned it in passing while writing the article but not elaborated on.

The first occasion was at the GIR 2008 leg in Bangalore where Satyricon and Extinct Reflections had performed and I’d walked to a standing bar and tanked up on a criminally humongous amount of Old Monk Rum with Ganesh K and Udupendra, only to realize after getting drunk that I had to cover the show and write about it.

The good folk in the magazine team that then comprised of Andrew and Reuben understood and let me write something half-assed, edited it and put it out there. Needless to say, I wasn’t able to recognize what I’d written because it had been edited and worked upon artfully to remove all traces of alcohol-induced memory loss.

The other major occasion was the Iron Maiden concert a few months later. I was on a high because I had quit my corporate job after getting a chance to go to B-school, I was dating the most awesome girl I’d met in my life till then (shesmovedon since) and I was as free and happy as I could be.

This heady feeling made me believe that I was invincible. I wasn’t. I realized that the morning after the show when I woke up with the worst hangover I’ve ever had.

But that didn’t stop me from drinking copious amounts of alcohol and saying funny things, while retaining a certain level of consciousness necessary to remember the most interesting events of the day, to pen it down later on for the magazine.

I appreciated the role of the staff writer immensely because I had also had a chance to see how the corporate world functions. While the corporate setup has its own pros and cons, what I realized was that the hippie within me found solace in the work that I was doing for Rock Street Journal. I was unencumbered by rules, restrictions and the necessity to be polite and politically correct.

It was just about doing exactly what I liked from every sense of the word. Listening to music, hanging out with interesting people and writing about listening to music and hanging out with interesting people, attending concerts for free, getting paid occasionally for all the writing I did. It was a win-win-win-win situation, whatever way I looked at it.

My friends used to joke about how I was like the kid in ‘Almost Famous’, only there were no groupies on the scene and I was slightly older.

You must be wondering why I’d want to give this up when it sounds like so much fun. People grow up, people change. There’s comfort in the constant changes that make you aware that you’re not stuck in a moment you can’t get out of. You can’t be the pretender and say you’ve had the time of your life, when you’re running against the wind along a winding road.

I will continue to remain associated with both music as well as writing, albeit in slightly different capacities in the days going forward. I am not clear of how just yet, but there are a few tentative plans.

I’m additionally going to do other fun stuff including starting up my own t-shirt company, Urban Banyan (like us on facebook yeah?).

For all those that have written in with opinions to both praise and criticize, I am grateful. Feedback has given me an indication that I am not writing content just to fill pages, but that it has had enough impact to evoke reactions from a few people at least.

There are a lot of people that I wish to thank for all the fun times I’ve had at RSJ.

They include (but are not limited to) Amit Saigal, Reuben Bhattacharya, Anupam Roy, Andrew Lu, Aaquib Wani, Akshika Gupta, Rohit Amwan, Siddharth Menon, Vibhu Sharma, Anoop Sebastian, Rajiv ji and PL. I’m also thankful to all the bands and other people that I interviewed (especially those that thanked me in turn on their album jackets – the kick one gets from seeing one’s name on an album is as awesome as seeing one’s name in print for sure!) and everyone else I have come across through the music scene that I am now friends with.

My family, my friends, my band mates from Heaven’s Dust, Arth (now Indi Graffiti), Conjoint, 60 Cycle Hum, and Ron and MD and Archita and all the other crazy people that mean enough to me for me not to be offended that they didn’t particularly read my stuff unless I made them do so at gunpoint, thank you all.

Lastly, I am not sure why this column even came into being. I was told to just keep writing stuff and for the most part, I’ve delivered and enjoyed myself immensely while doing so.

As Oscar Wilde said, “I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know anything about.” This is how it all began. I hope you’ve enjoyed the ride. Thank you for reading!