The autographing was around the time I interviewed him for a cover story for RSJ, in April this year, which finally didn’t happen for reasons I’m not sure of.

I’ve also written a review for that album and sent it to the guys who’re supposed to launch the new version of gigpad, though I’m going to check with them if I can post album reviews on my site as well after addressing any potential cöpyright issues.

However, on 16th November 08, Sunday, I had been to the Landmarks bookstore in Swagath Garuda Mall, where I got a chance to see a live performance by him. I guess Facebook does wonders, and it was through an invite on it that I was even aware that such an event was taking place.

According to unconfirmed sources (me), apparently, for the first and only time in its existence, Swagath Garuda Mall finally had a sizeable number of footfalls, as people gathered en masse to see Raghu live, and mysteriously disappeared thereafter when the performance was over.

There’s something magical and nice about unplugged performances. They are quite intimate, and aren’t as high-adrenaline as the fully plugged ones. I’d witnessed TAAQ play their first ever ‘unplugged’ show at Alliance Français last year, and the unplugged accoustic jams that our band has, with my bass guitar being the only instrument that requires amplification (I am a cheap guy without an accoustic bass) are also a whole lot of fun.

Raghu Dixit was accompanied by Vijay Joseph on guitars, and while I wasn’t really sure whether Landmarks would be able to have enough space to cast aside for a performance along with a crowd, they did manage to have a good setup, and the sound quailty was impeccable, atleast where I was standing, which was right up front.

Junta turned up in hordes, for it was a free concert, and Raghu Dixit’s playful banter with the crowd, I am sure, won him some new fans.

He started off with a song (I still love you) that I’d last heard being performed on 5th May 2001, when I was standing in the first row at the Bryan Adams concert, and it brought back fond memories of that day when everyone in the front row got spat on by Bryan Adams when he was singing ‘back to (thoo) you’ and all that.

Aside from that, he played ‘Mysore se Aayi’, ‘Gudugudiya Sedi Nodu’, ‘Hey Bhagwan’ and one of my favourite songs by him titled ‘Ambar’. The last song’s rendition was, I felt, quite magical, as I closed my eyes and just immersed myself in the song.

Most unplugged songs tend to sound somewhat different from when the artists perform a fully plugged set, but in this case, Raghu’s powerful voice, combined with some masterful guitar work by Vijay Joseph made me not miss the other instruments, including, surprisingly, the bass guitar as well.

The crowd got quite noisy around the time when Raghu began performing songs from his movie ‘Psycho’, for everyone present there seemed to know the songs, and sang along uninhibitedly.

Most people were too busy taking videos to enjoy what was happening on stage, and this tendency to record or take photographs, in my opinion, kills the moment when one should rather be immersed in the music than be doing something to record it for later. Unless their memory sucks.

I was not able to bear the noise after a while, and decided to make a gracious exit around twenty past seven, when I knew Raghu would be almost finishing up.

Here’s hoping to see more of his performances in the days to come.

We’re looking at demo CD cover material, when we’re ready to come out with more songs that we’re totally comfortable with. In order to achieve this, we decided to get some interesting pictures at the railway station, as we stood stationary against a teeming sea of humanity.

What this was intended to achieve, I have no idea, honestly, but the image of the picture in my mind certainly looked really nice, as did the photo previews once Shrenik clicked a few and showed us on his DSLR.

There was a goods train which was parked at the station, and we wanted to get some shots in its vicinity, for which I approached the station master and took his permission. Initially, he mentioned something about having to get permission from some PR person in Bangalore city, and after a certain amount of convincing, which included flashing my press card, he finally relented.

Personally, I doubt we’d need special permission since there is no mention anywhere of photography being prohibited, and we only asked the station master for the sake of courtesy, so that he’d not get suspicious of our harmless activities and shoo us away.

In the midst of shooting photographs, however, a police constable appeared out of nowhere and asked us to stop taking pictures. I had to go and have a conversation with him again, and explain as to how we’d obtained permission from the station master and that it was all ok.

This cop then said we have to take permission from the Sub-Inspector at the neighbouring police station, and I told him to lead the way. I did not see why I had to get any additional permission, but I figured we’d have to ask whoever we had to.

Halfway to the station, this constable eventually said that he’d come back later on, and said I could go. On returning, we wrapped our work up soon, since it was getting hot in the afternoon, and I wasn’t particularly comfortable with the cop’s behaviour. As we made our way to the parking lot, this old codger, who seemed to be in his late 50s, came behind us and spoke to me, asking me what we’d done, and why these photos were necessary.

It was evident by now, if it hadn’t been already, that he was fishing for a bribe. However, he didn’t know that I wouldn’t pay a bribe ever. I was shocked at his blatant shamelessness in asking for money when, clearly, there was no reason for us to have paid him. We weren’t doing anything wrong, and even if we were, he had no business asking us for money on the side.

I politely told him that we’d be back in the evening and click more photographs, to avoid a full blown confrontation and we made our exit from there. Needless to say, I shall not be visiting the KR Puram railway station again for getting photos taken with the band.

I find it particularly sad that as free citizens of our country, we’d have to be fearful of doing something as innocent and innocuous as taking photographs at a railway station and be on our guard against unscrupulous elements who are unfortunately the ones who weild power and authority.

As defined in the wiki page that I hope you haven’t been lazy enough not to click on, a Roast refers to the opportunity to make uninhibited fun and this is precisely what I am about to do. The entire idea to do a roast was brought about by a discussion I had with a certain Palash Mehrotra (who has incidentally been in the news along with the likes of Aravind Adiga, Tarun Tejpal and Nandan Nikelani – alliterative names all – for getting atrocious advance sums for the books they plan to write).

Now that the name dropping is out of the way, Palash and I were in conversation regarding whether the movie was good for the music scene in general or was it just trying to define a Bollywood-ish view of rock, in order to cash in on the latest trends. I presented him with my take on the movie, and I thought it would make for good material to blog about.

Let me start with the positives of the movie. It tries to break the stereotype associated with someone who is part of a rock band. The previous view that one would’ve had of only junkies / social misfits / psychopaths trying to use rock music as a release is now being questioned. As evinced in the movie, it is quite possible for an investment banker, a jeweler’s son and for people in other such respectable professions to get together and play in a band. Ladies, it is now (more) acceptable to take home to your folks someone who plays in a band, without your folks worrying about having to commit you to an institution.

While it is true that there are musicians who get wasted like nobody’s business, that is true even of people in all other professions that one can think of.

The movie does try to make rock music socially acceptable. Thanks to the movie, rock isn’t something that the kids listen to in order to headbang away, and even people in their mid 30s and beyond, as shown in the movie seem to be able to groove to such music. Those who have attended concerts in Bangalore would no doubt certify to this claim anyway, but now the additional facet of mass appeal attached would make such a claim even more believable.

The movie is slightly different from most of the standard issue Bollywood fare, and is able to differentiate itself with a certain amount of class. Full respect to Farhan Akhtar for having learnt to play the guitar and for singing all the songs himself, and Prachi Desai and Nicolette Bird are cutemax. Seriously.

Now that the praise is out of the way, I wish to begin the roast. The band, named ‘Magik’ does not have a bassist. I wouldn’t really have a problem with it, except for that I play the bass guitar for a band myself, and if the movie is to be believed, my instrument is redundant and someone with a keyboard can ‘program the basslines’ and be done with it. Yes, and the peon can double up to be a project manager on the side, should a company face a shortage of employees.

Arjun Rampal’s character is considered to be one of the best guitarists on the planet. So much so that he can, with one hand, play everything that Joe Satriani, Eric Johnson and Steve Vai need two hands to play on. His immense talent is lauded through the movie, and is highlighted by his incredible ability to play every song on screen using two hand positions that I have named the ‘Tiger Claw’ and ‘Fingering’. Imagine what a stud he must be if he can ‘play’ every song ever known to man by simply using two positions of his hand.

The band’s onstage performance looked more like the ‘Mock Rock’ performances that seems to be the rage in most VTU colleges, where people ‘play’ musical instruments to a previously recorded soundtrack. Magik would’ve become the undisputed mock rock champions of the world, had they deigned to participate in all these competitions.

Lastly, I am peeved with the lyrics of the songs in the movie. The songs sound like they had been written by the band in class three, and rediscovered by them fourty years later in a dusty attic. Despite that, they seem to have gone ahead and used the same content to ask questions like ‘Why isn’t two plus two equal to five?’ and ‘Sinbad the sailor’ and ‘I lost my lunchbox every day in the past seven days’. With all due respect to Javed Akhtar who has come up with stud lyrics, this isn’t the kind of stuff that most self-respecting rock bands would like to come up with.

Having said that, considering I play for a Hindi rock band, our songs aren’t too stellar by any stretch of imagination either. However a certain amount of self-realization, combined with some intense brain-washing might just aid us in making a better job out of what we intend to come out with.

Lastly, I think I’m just jealous of ‘Magik’, considering our band doesn’t even enjoy one billionth the popularity they seem to have achieved. Maybe that is why I did the roast in the first place. Oh whatever, to hell with it.

Not knowing what to do, I had previously linked my domain name to my blog, which most often than not received random traffic from search engines due to reasons I’d rather not be too proud about, for now.

I was additionally maintaining a livejournal wherein I had initially started putting in any arbit rambling that I wanted to pen down and preserve, and this sounding board then turned out to be the one that I used with greater frequency compared to my blog, which I was afraid I was going to abandon.

In the midst of maintaining a blog and a livejournal, I chanced upon a few blogs that were hosted on their own server spaces and had exclusive URLs, and this, combined with the need to customize what I spew out in writing prompted me to purchase server space and host this website on wordpress, which is what you are seeing right now. In this regard, I have to thank Aadisht and SKimpy, for their random tech support level assistance on gtalk as well as for having guided me to Madhu Menon, who provided me with the necessary server space, and deserves to be thanked as well.

Thanks also to Monkee, the cheap guy that he is, for having been the first person to subscribe to the RSS feeds of my new website, much before I could do so myself, and for some invaluable inputs and constructive criticisms that prevented me from doing some things that I realized in retrospect were stupid.

Shrenik Sadalgi, friend, colleague and photographer extraordinaire provided me with his old camera – a Canon powershot A620, which is super enough for my face, to shoot the pics that you can see in the header. Refreshing or clicking on other links will switch the header image, thanks to a php script written by Matt Mullenweg.

The wordpress forums are stud level so far as resolving issues related to everything under the sun is concerned, and it is a result of their assistance that I’ve been able to put my site in the current shape that it is in.

Clicking on the bars on top will take you to the different categories under which I’ve posted, and I will update and add new stuff to it. Currently, if your office’s internet proxy isn’t benevolent enough, you will not be able to see any media under the music category.

The primary intent of the blog is to fan my already bloated ego, and also to serve as a means of providing me with more freelance writing opportunities, the likes of which I have engaged in for a few print as well as online publications. I have managed to import and include most of my blog and LJ entries into this site, but I haven’t been able to tag and categorize all 400 (approx) of them for now, which means that you will still see that ‘uncategorized’ label on the top bar until I’ve had enough time, patience and enthusiasm to remedy it.

Feedback is most welcome, just leave a comment, and do subscribe to the RSS feeds of my site. This new blogging journey will be awesome!

I wholeheartedly intend to Rock you like a Haricane.

I play the bass guitar for a band named ‘Arth’. Our lyrics are in Hindi, and one can classify our music under the rock genre.

On the first day of the beginning of the second half of 2008, we’ve uploaded three mp3s of our as part of an initial demo we’ve recorded. The instruments were recorded at home, the drums were programmed and the vocals were recorded at G3 studios in Chennai.

This is the link to the band blog from where you can download the mp3s – http://arthband.blogspot.com.

The songs are under creative commons license – free to distribute and download, but please ask us if you want to modify it.

I’d really be appreciative if you were to listen to the songs and spread the word about our demo either through word of mouth (and by that I mean gtalk, heh!) or by putting up something on your blog / LJ that would link to the aforementioned band blog. The more publicity, the merrier.

We’re also on Facebook on the artist’s pages, do join up there as well.

If you like the music, tell the others. If you think it sucks, tell us!

Cheerio!

Although Mysore will always be city no.1 so far as I am concerned for the rest of my life, I’ve grown to love Bangalore so much more after a weekend trip to Chennai. Three days in Chennai on band related work and within twelve hours of landing there, I was pining away for Bangalore and its weather.

Although an inefficient public transport system, bad traffic and moronic motorists and too many IT junta show up as some definite downers against the city’s name, the positives are way too many to discount.

I’d initially taken Bangalore weather for granted, given the fact that Mysore shares pretty much similar weather, although it has been the trend over the past few years to have hotter summers and colder winters in Mysore, but three days in Chennai has made me realize how awesome this city is.

I’d never ever spent more than 24 hours at a stretch in Chennai, and in the absence of air conditioned hotel rooms or an air conditioned studio, death would’ve ensued.

On returning to Bangalore, after getting off the train and heading back home, the cool breeze that kept messing up my short hair in the auto, the familiar Kannada abuses that the auto driver was heaping on other motorists that were navigating the roads as badly as he was, the fact that I could map out the entire route to my place from the railway station (as opposed to not being able to do such a thing at a new place) just made me feel so good.

True, Chennai is slightly more ordered and the infrastructure seems to be in place in a much better manner vis-a-vis Bangalore, and Anna Salai is everywhere in Chennai, but Bangalore just rocks. Period.