The Mix Tape Misadventure
As someone who considers himself a connoisseur of the written word, it is quite surprising that I have read very few books related to music writing.
Sure, I’ve read books about bands, about artists and as an ardent fan-boy, gone through statistics and collected information that I thought would serve me well during times when I needed to access it fast, though the occasion to do so hardly ever presented itself.
Most of my reading has been through music magazines and in online content that I thought was fun and
interesting. Neither, however, compared to a book and I guess this is why I picked up “Love Is a Mix Tape” by Rob Sheffield, which is an autobiographical tale that documents Rob’s love story, told with a mix-tape of songs associated with each chapter.
It was an appropriately nostalgic tale interwoven with enough music and pop culture to keep an information junkie like me feel intelligent when I recognized all the references it was peppered with. Additionally, it exposed me to a whole new set of artists and songs for my grooveshark listening.
What it also did was to make my mind trip down memory lane to a time back in 2001 when I had made my first mix-tape for a girl. Before you think this is a cheese-fest of sorts, dear Reader, let me inform you that by the time you reach the end of this column, you will realize that this anecdote is far from it.
I met this girl (let’s call her mixtape girl, for obvious reasons) when I was in the first year of engineering college at the college canteen and we began talking on random occasions. The occasions were, for the most part, engineered by me because I knew her time-table and knew on what days she’d show up at the canteen and at what times. I thought it wasn’t fairly obvious that I was there only to talk to her, because I was widely regarded as a loafer who didn’t do much else in college except hang in the canteen.
I quite fancied her and I did all that I could by way of trying to be funny / charming / interesting to endear myself to her. So much so, that on one occasion during the brief period when I was interested in her, I played her a song on the guitar after much practice, only to be somewhat nervous when the moment of truth arrived, which resulted in me forgetting the lyrics and making a total mess of the song.
Quite like in the movies, this tale also had a villain. Quite unlike the movies however, I wasn’t the flawless hero. In fact, in retrospect, I was quite an asshole myself as you will see.
The villain was a chap who I considered a complete douche of the first order, and he and I were the two kids that played the guitar in our batch in college. As things transpired, we were engaged in one-upmanship to prove that one was cooler than the other.
This chap, who we shall refer to as guitar2, liked a girl. This is where things get messed up some more.
The girl he liked was a family friend’s daughter, and as luck would’ve had it, was the one girl that I was in love for the past five years since I was thirteen.
See, I told you this is not the average cheese-fest. Yes?
I wasn’t able to tell her how much I liked her because her conservative family wanted her married soon as she finished her undergrad studies, while I was the typical hippie that wasn’t sure of what direction his life would take.
Guitar2 confessed to me that he liked this girl and I shamelessly went and told her about this. Being good friends with her, I also told her what a douche guitar2 was and this resulted in him never having a glimmer of a chance with her. Not that he stood a chance in the first place, or so I’d like to think.
In the meanwhile, I was trying to woo mixtape girl like mad. I found out who her favourite bands were and she gave me the usual jazz about how she liked Pink Floyd. Every engineering college student in the late 90s and early 2000s liked Pink Floyd. If you didn’t, you were so uncool that you could’ve as well lived in Gurgaon.
Wait. I live in Gurgaon now. FML.
Anyway, I put together a nice Nirvana unplugged live in New York tape for mixtape girl on her birthday and she was beside herself with joy. I thought I had a chance of being with her and continued with my relentless pursuit. The book that I referred to, incidentally, has an entire chapter deconstructing the Nirvana unplugged album.
Guitar2, seething with anger because I let the family friend girl know of his intentions decided to pay me back and told mixtape girl an exaggerated tale about things that I had supposedly said about her behind her back. Mixtape girl fancied another guy anyway, and she felt that my supposed transgressions were enough for her to not talk to me anymore.
Guitar2 had his revenge, while I ended up making a mix-tape for someone else without getting anything in return. It ended up being the only mix-tape I ever made for anyone.
I guess Karma came back to bite me in the ass and made me realize that I was horribly wrong in what I had done. I know that I’d have done things differently if I were faced with similar circumstances now, but having hindsight isn’t really empowering.
As the title of the book goes, life is indeed a mix-tape. No super-evil villains, no goody two-shoes heroes. We’re all more multi-layered than we’d give us credit for.
Finally, do read the book. It does get cheesy in parts, but it is well executed music-related writing. If nothing else, it will trigger those parts of your memory that will probably make you think of the mix-tapes you’ve made and the stories around why you made them.
Crossing the Israeli – West Bank Barrier
This is the previous post in the series.
Standing at the Manger Square, I looked around not knowing what to do until the Midnight Mass began. Generally, I am quite comfortable walking up to strangers and starting conversation with them. But here, people were moving in groups and each group, for some strange reason seemed clumped with no solo travelers visible on the horizon.
I was scheduled to meet up with Sandeep Hans, a friend and former colleague who is now a PhD student at Technion in Haifa. However, he was delayed by a bit. I had a cell phone connection that I’d taken before I left for my trip, but being the cheap guy I was, I did not use it unless there was an absolute emergency and thus spent about an hour walking around the place.
The Bethlehem visitor’s center was all decked up and helpful, polite staff were present to provide us with paraphernalia and a ‘certificate of pilgrimage’ that states how Hari Shenoy was a pilgrim who visited the holy town of Bethlehem on the eve of Jesus’ birthday or something like that. The certificate is cool and is on one of the shelves in the place I’m currently staying at.
I finally met up with Sandeep, and after eating once again, went towards the milk grotto and saw it from the outside. The Church of Nativity loomed large on our left as we walked towards the grotto and although one does realize how important this place is for such a vast section of humanity, I did feel a slight sense of anticlimax, probably because I don’t subscribe strongly to Christianity as an organized religion.
The program for the evening comprised of many activities being conducted on a large stage in the manger square, followed by a live telecast of the midnight mass on the giant screen. Tickets to view the midnight mass from within the Church of the Nativity need to be purchased much in advance and I found that out only when I reached Jerusalem.
There were people from various nationalities that had gathered there and while there were many pious people, there were plenty of curious onlookers as well. The on-stage festivities comprised of carols, speeches and mostly renditions of other Arabic songs.
The music critic in me was thinking of how the sound system was crappy and the sound field was bad. But the traveler in me was exhilarated and soaking the atmosphere in. I’m sure where I was on Christmas eve was on the bucket list of destinations for most Christians, pious or otherwise.
One gets to witness more than one’s fair share of Israel’s armed forces when one is visiting the country. For a change, I was able to see the Palestinian police and their elite commandos guarding Mahmoud Abbas’ entourage, in all probability, to protect him more from the Hamas than from Israeli forces. I also managed to have a glimpse of the man himself as he was ushered into the Church of the Nativity a little before the mass started.
Once midnight stuck, it was all hymns and prayers and the massive crowd that had gathered seemed to get bored. The collective thought process of the crowd there could be summed up into, “Jesus’ birthday has arrived, we waited for the clock to strike 12, let’s get out of here and party!”
In my case, I wanted to spend the next day in Jerusalem’s old city, walking the stations of the cross and I didn’t want to pay extra money to stay the night in Bethlehem. I know, I know, walking the stations of the cross is something one does on Good Friday, but I wasn’t going to be there that day and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was high on my list of places to visit.
It is indeed interesting, how I managed to travel to the supposed birthplace of Jesus and to the supposed place where he died and was resurrected subsequently, all in one day, with a distance of no more than 25 kilometres. Interesting, especially considering his India escapades, his constant appearances on South Park and on a more serious note, considering how a man whose point-to-point geographical displacement from birth to death, despite being so small, had had such an impact on the world as we know it.
Having passed through Beit Jala on the Arab bus, I made my way back to a place where I had to board a Sherut (shared taxi) to Jerusalem. This walk from the manger square to the boarding point was as intriguing as the experience of being in Bethlehem itself.
Lots of traffic on the streets, many cars with PL (Palestine) and a few others with IL registration license plates, people shouting around, cops regulating traffic in the chilly winter evening, menacing stares from some of the locals with low tolerance thresholds for brown people, friendly smiles from old ladies who were on their way home, random photographs of Christmas decorations, the smell of Chrismas all around, carols with familiar tunes and unfamiliar words, a walk that was picture perfect because it wasn’t so.
This walk lasted almost five to six kilometres and at the end of it, I was facing this massive wall. On the way to Bethlehem, the bus to Beit Jala took a route that didn’t require one to pass this huge wall that is the infamous Israeli West Bank Barrier.
This controversial barrier, that has evoked mixed reactions from people on either side of it, was lit eerily by yellow lighting that made the graffiti on it seem very night-club like. The wiki page shows you all the cool graffiti that has been drawn on it, some of it by the likes of Banksy and Roger Waters.
I was uncomfortable around the wall. I wanted to get out of its immediate proximity because I could perceive a strong feeling of negative energy around it. As a third-party observer, I knew the pros and cons of its existence. As a third-party observer, I could do nothing but ruminate.
I walked along the barrier for nearly a kilometer and reached a checkpoint. By this time, it was only tourists that were mostly present, crossing over from the West Bank into Israel post the midnight mass. The guard on the Palestinian side was friendly and was grinning away. I bade him good night and walked into the zone between the two sections, onto the Israeli side.
The Israeli side wasn’t as welcoming and had a couple of surly looking guards, who scanned baggage and made people pass through metal detectors. Directions were being given through what sounded like a rude public address system and after checking my passport and visa, they allowed me back into the Israeli side.
I boarded a Sherut and was dropped off in fifteen minutes at the Jaffa gate in Jerusalem. As I walked from Jaffa gate to the West Jerusalem neighbourhood of Romema at 2-30 AM, my first day in Jerusalem was coming to an end.
9 hours – Jerusalem, Bethlehem, The Western Wall, the Dome of the Rock, the Church of the Nativity. A short duration, but a lifetime of memories. I was happier than I ever imagined I would be. Ditto for being exhausted.
Next post: Christmas in Jerusalem.
My Experiments with Fooding
I was just involved in a discussion on cookery shows with another buddy of mine, which followed from the last episode of season 14 in South Park and there’s many things I thought of as a result of that conversation.
After I moved out of my parents’ place, I have lived my own for almost seven years, mostly in Bangalore, Hyderabad and now Gurgaon. I’ve had to learn cooking to survive and I’ve decided that I will devote extensive time in the future towards mastering and honing my culinary skills, both as a means of addressing my strong need to eat good food and also because cooking, in my opinion is an art form that can provide much delight.
Eating out extensively during this time, both by choice and by compulsion has led to me having some observations on food that I wanted to pen down, to revisit during those times when my passion for food would probably wane in the face of life getting in the way, so that I can renew my faith in my gastronomic forays once again.
1. Local food (in India) is awesome: An open mind and an open heart are supposedly two necessary pre-requisites to being a good person. This applies to food as well and getting out of one’s food comfort zone to sample the local fare in whatever part of the country one is in makes for great experiences.
Our country has a maddening range of local food options and the difference in cuisine is evident across small distances. Karnataka food, for instance is different along the coast, in North Karnataka and even towards the south in Bangalore and Mysore. Each style of cuisine, in turn, is splendid and there’s enough variety for one to keep cycling through and not get bored of the food.
For instance, when I was living in Bangalore, there used to be this little place that served jowar rotis with different dal and curry at a reasonable rate and they’d pack it well. Being a ten minute walk away from where I stayed in Banashankari stage 3, this was an awesome place to head out to in order to have some tasty, nutritious food.
2. Never write off vegetarian food: There’s a constant tussle between vegetarians and non-vegetarians regarding the respective virtues of each type of food. I’ve been on both sides and even though I’ve enjoyed Al-Kauser’s galouti and kakori kebabs on many a wintry evening (and I am drooling as I write this) and had some fantastic conveyor belt sushi at the Yum Yum Tree, the best meals I can recall having in my entire life are vegetarian.
Great food isn’t only about the taste, but also about the time when you eat it. For instance, here’s a post I wrote nearly four years ago about the best meal I have had in my life.
Another memorable set of meals that I have consumed were the packed lunches prepared by the women’s self-help group kitchen at Anegundi. Tasty, low on oil, nutritious and brilliant beyond words.
The supposed lack of vegetarian options abroad is also a myth, with vegetarianism and vegan lifestyles percolating through into the most ardent meat consuming regions on the planet that people want to travel to. Of course, the definition of ‘vegetarian’ might vary, but that is a minor matter that is of very little concern to me personally.
3. Fine Dining is worth the money paid for it: Fine dining is part of experimenting with cuisine. Cuisines from different parts of Europe, the Middle East, the Far East and even from the Americas can all be amazing. However, for someone to cook it the right way to maintain authentic taste by using the right ingredients might cost a lot more here than it does in the place of origin of said food item.
Quite obvious, I’d reckon, considering how even across India, staple food in one place is considered reasonably exotic elsewhere. There still is no justification to charge INR 50 for a plate of idlis here in the NCR, but I’d consume it regardless, simply because any South Indian food going into a South Indian’s belly is always a good thing.
What one would pay for, insofar as fine dining is concerned is the authenticity, expertise as well as the ambience and if this is infrequent, the price paid for it however high, albeit within the bounds of affordability is well worth it.
4. Always Experiment: Every single time I end up going to a place alone, or with people that are keen on experimenting, I order something I’ve not eaten before. This is how I discovered food like Kakiage Don, Po’boys, Clam Chowder, Doro Wat with Injera and many other memorable food items that I am grateful to have consumed.
As nutrition expert Adelle Davis said, “We are indeed much more than what we eat, but what we eat can nevertheless help us be much more than what we are.”
Lunch time. Later!
Coming Soon – Coke Studio India ?
MTV is supposed to screen it and I’m all excited to check out artists like Swarathma, the Raghu Dixit Project, Shaair + Func, Jalebee Cartel, Midival Punditz, Advaita, Kailash Kher, Lounge Piranha, Bicycle Days and many others whose names I can’t recall straight up because I’ve got a corporate presentation to wrap up in the next thirty minutes.
Collaboration among Pakistani artists has led to some fantastic music being churned out and Coke Studio Pakistan still has some of the best live music that I have listened to in recent times. I must admit that I prefer studio recorded tracks in general because of the higher production quality and the musical arrangements that I pay significant attention to.
However, the production quality for Coke Studio has been fantastic with mp3s available for free download as well as high quality streaming content available on the site.
What artists would you like to see on the Indian version of Coke Studio?
Prolonged Silence
Yeah. That’s me right now. It is an overwhelming feeling which is like the kind that hits you when you’re with someone you love and there’s no paucity of content worth discussing.
There’s quite a lot of stuff that I want to write about, but I have been busy with life in general and have hence been unable to get back here. It is also quite a task to intersperse flashback posts about my trip to Israel (which I am still in the middle of writing and I have TONS to write) along with more recent posts and I’m just worried that the links to previous posts might not work as well as writing them in sequence all at once.
In any case, some writing is better than no writing at all. If you’ve been looking forward to reading more content from here, dear Reader, you will not be disappointed in the days ahead.
Christmas Eve in Bethlehem – Part 1 – The Manger Square
I walked along the cobbled streets of the old city towards the Damascus gate. It is here that I must pause to inform you that the old city of Jerusalem has eight gates that provided access to the city during ancient times, one of which is closed. If I digress to explain, I’m afraid I will cross the self-imposed word limit I have on each of my posts and I must therefore make a note to myself to write about this at another time.
Arab / Palestinian buses were available from the Damascus gate to take people onto Palestinian occupied territories and I’d heard that the last bus to Bethlehem was leaving around seven. Not wanting to take chances, I landed there at ten minutes to seven, only to discover that there would be plenty of buses headed in that direction because it was Christmas time.
The bus I boarded charged me 6.5 NIS and was going to drop me off at the Arab village of Beit Jala. Beit Jala and Beit Sahour are the two Arab villages that sandwich the town of Bethlehem and can be seen from either side of the city.
Given the size of cities and towns in India, I found Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the two largest Israeli cities reasonably small and walkable, with my feet paying the price for it at the end of it all. The bus was to drop me at Beit Jala and I had to then walk a few kilometres to the Manger Square outside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
The bus was full of Palestinian Arabs and a bunch of foreign tourists that were headed south of Jerusalem and the ride lasted about 45 minutes. The driver took us through a route that circumvented any checkpoint that Israel had maintained and therefore, I wasn’t able to tell during the onward journey from Jerusalem to Bethlehem as to when I’d actually crossed over from Israel into Palestine.
At Beit Jala, the bus dropped us all and I a cabbie stopped me and said he’d drop me to Bethlehem for 50 NIS. I told him that I don’t have that kind of money, to which he was ready to take 10 NIS in return for dropping me off to somewhere close to the Manger Square.
Seeing as how he lowered his fees, I felt that the place wasn’t too far off and decided to walk it. As I walked on the only main road that I saw, I wasn’t sure if I was going along in the right direction, because I couldn’t see any Christian looking people along the way, if that makes any sense. Most of the people that passed by en route looked distinctively Palestinian and for what its worth, it could’ve even been the friday evening rush after prayers, though I later realized that this was a predominantly Arab-Christian area and I was doing the right thing all along by following the crowd.
The Palestinian police force was patrolling this road and I could see policemen scattered all along the route on regular intervals. I also spotted a lot of hawkers selling sweet tea and assorted food items and also chanced upon the obligatory plethora of falafel stands that seemed to be all over the country.
The road seemed to slope downward considerably until a point in time where it finally opened up to reveal a square filled with people and it was then that it dawned upon me that I was standing in the Manger Square in Bethlehem.
The entire square was covered with cobbled stones and was surrounded by shops, restaurants, a mosque, the Bethlehem visitors’ information center and of course, the Church of the Nativity. With a beautifully decorated gigantic Christmas tree in its compound, the church was lit up brightly like it was Christmas eve.
Wait. It was Christmas eve.
Passes to attend the Midnight Mass are distributed three weeks before Christmas and need to be collected in Jerusalem. This meant that I was unable to go inside that day and pass through the Door of Humility to see that location where a silver star marks the spot that is supposedly the exact birthplace of Jesus. Being within a 50 meter radius of that place was, for the time being, enough for me for all the activity within the church during midnight mass would be telecast live on a giant screen that was put up at the square.
The stage on which the midnight mass was projected was the arena for many a performance to take place as a whole bunch of people sung carols and put up what seemed like impromptu performances to entertain the crowd. A man came and extolled the virtues of Mahmoud Abbas, who I later managed to get a brief glimpse of as he arrived with his heavily guarded motorcade to enter the church for the mass.
For the most part, the stage was empty and it seemed like I was attending a rock concert where the band had now showed up. Funnily enough, it seemed very much like the scene at the Western Wall, where I had been just a few hours ago.
As I stood there in the middle of the Manger Square, surrounded by a massive bunch of Palestinian people and other tourists that had visited the place specially for the midnight mass, I couldn’t believe that I had, in one evening, managed to see the Western Wall, the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque and the Church of the Nativity, all within four hours of each other.
The next post contains my experiences interacting with the Palestinian tourism board as well as the crossing of the wall that separates the Palestinian occupied territories from Israel.
