Rocking in the Free World » Peter Pan in Real Life

My Last RSJ Column

Hari — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 06:45:54 +0000

This is the last column piece I wrote for Rock Street Journal before saying goodbye. It is long – 2000 words or so. You have been warned.

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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!

The Mix Tape Misadventure

Hari — Mon, 16 May 2011 07:49:22 +0000

This is one of the pieces I wrote for my column on Rock Street Journal in its April 2011 issue. It is more personal than most posts, which is why I think I enjoyed writing it so much.

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.

2010: The year that was – Part 1

Hari — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 13:53:28 +0000

I’d written a post at the start of last year to document personal milestones / accomplishments / fun things that took place in my life in 2009 and when I look back on it, I realize that the content in that post brings back memories of times that have been relegated to the back of my head, primarily due to other, more immediate things that seem to have taken up space instead.

However, it is nice to occasionally meander around in the recesses of one’s mind to dig up and unearth things that would otherwise be remembered only through memory triggers.

January 2010:

Another new year’s eve in Mysore at home and as good a start to the year as any.
Went to IIT Madras for the second time in as many years, this time to have an exclusive interview with Hammerfall. Hammerfall is a fun band whose sound I’d describe as entry level power metal and even though they didn’t hold a candle to Opeth in 2009, the time spent in IIT Madras was fun.
On a side note, even though I still have the Hammerfall interview recording, the story never saw the light of day at RSJ. Just as well.
On a lighter note, placements began in full earnest on the ISB campus. I volunteered as a control room coordinator and later on as the point of contact for a few companies including AT Kearney on day 1 and saw all the high GPA studs in my batch juggling between various consulting job offers. This was pressure at its extreme and as sour-grapish as it might sound, I was, in retrospect glad not to have been wearing a suit and making life-changing decisions regarding which job to take. My simple little brain that might’ve exploded in such a situation.

February 2010:

The pranks on campus continued, as did the extreme debauchery. The class of 2010 hung on in quiet desperation at the prospect of securing employment and breaking away from the vicious circle of the placement rigmarole.
I interviewed with a whole bunch of firms – I’ve honestly lost count. But the classic blooper moments I underwent still make me smile to this day. One of those was when I showed up half asleep at an interview and after one round, was made to interact with the CEO despite not having worked on a preliminary assignment that was required to be completed as part of their selection procedure. Chutzpah alone didn’t work and I didn’t get the job, though far more dedicated and deserving people did.
The other interview that makes me facepalm myself was one where I was asked to draw the Porter’s 5 forces diagram on the board. I blanked, forgot and made a mess of the whole thing. The interviewer and I shared a good laugh about it at the end of it all. You remember more of what you missed than of the one shot that hit the target.
I’d had too much mirinda just before another interview and let out a loud burp while in conversation. Turns out, the recruiters weren’t too sanguine about my prospects in their firm as a result of my orange tongue and teeth. The burp, I suppose, had nothing to do with it.
Rock in India had Backstreet Boys and Richard Marx perform. The less said about this, the better.
I finally signed out of the placement process when a business research firm based in Gurgaon (yes, based in and not based out of) decided to give me a job. I didn’t really have to jump through hoops to get the job, but I was convinced in my head back then that this was what I needed to act as a springboard for the next stage of my life.
I was out of placements, but friends were still in the hunt. They celebrated with me and I tried my best to egg them on as they continued along in the process. Intense pressure and relief, turns out, have similar cathartic vents and the debauchery and the escapades that ensued continued unabated.

March 2010:

The number of companies arriving on campus for placements thinned down until there was but a mere trickle.
People gave up and decided to make the most of life and times on campus and March 2010 became one of the most fun months ever.
The countless instances of hanging out with friends in different circles and indulging in everything except studying seemed to compensate more than amply for all the studying that was done in the initial part of the course (by the high achievers, of course).
Unexpected visitors from Madras ushered in fond, if transient memories.
The last full month on the ISB campus saw as much mayhem and chaos as did the previous eleven, so no changes there.

April 2010:

The ISB rock band, Conjoint, performed its Swansong show for a full three hours in the last couple of days before graduation. We played so much that people gave up and went to sleep before it was done. Turns out, we took their chants of “once more” in our previous shows a little too much to heart. The rock band and all the friends I made that were part of it made B-school special in ways that I can’t describe.
Got the torchbearer award – this added another cute bullet point to a resume that otherwise seemed average in comparison with those that my illustrious contemporaries sported. Humbling as B-school turned out to be, I learnt that we all have our place under the sun.
Graduation happened three days before I turned 27. My folks were there. I could, for the first time, know for certain that they were proud of their kid, in just the same way as 570 other sets of families that showed up were for the achievements of their wards.
My trusty backpack followed me to the graduation ceremony as well and the reason why it was with me is an interesting story in itself, to be told when I don’t have enough to write about, try as hard as I’d like to.
Spent my birthday in my favourite place in the world at home in Mysore. Did nothing of note and thats what made it special.
Returned to Hyderabad on the 10th of April for orientation week of the class of 2011. The most memorable thing, aside from the immense fun that it provided was making the entire class keep the faith.
Left for Gurgaon on the 18th of April and that was when I realized how much South India rocks. I yearn to return, but I will do my time here before I earn my passage back down south.
The April heat was negated by the fun times had in the first few days at work and the fun times had with the Prince of Gurgaon, Samridh.

May 2010:

Two trips to Bangalore happened within a fortnight, the first was to attend Krithik’s wedding. The second one was a longer stint that ran through for an entire week and a half and began with the Simian wedding.
Monkee was expected to get married earlier than most of us, but when it actually happened, one could hear the clock ticking as a countdown to the impending end of bachelorhood, were the stakeholders in my life keen on ending my solo reverie. Turns out, they hadn’t even thought about it. Phew.
An air-conditioner and a TV (brought on EMI despite having liquidity) in Gurgaon turned out to be the blessing that reinforced my faith in modern technology. Not exactly spartan living, but not conspicuous consumption either.
The heat made me pray for winters. The cold in the winter (briefly) made me pray for summer. When its hot, he wants it cold and when its cold, he wants it hot.
Very little time was spent in the office thanks to a plethora of paid leaves taken and as will be seen in part 2 of this series, it came back to bit me hard in the gluteal region.

June 2010:

And then there were four.
Another trip to Mysore, the third one in two months was undertaken. The only bright spot in an otherwise bad month.
More people from the ISB class of 2010 kept streaming in into Gurgaon, making this place better and more live-able.
Blackberry messenger, as it turned out, was the de facto mode of staying in touch and this piece of software can take credit for some of the nice things that happened in June 2010.

To be continued…..

Of Writing and Travel and Travel Writing

Hari — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 06:25:20 +0000

There are many reasons why one would like to travel to a particular place. I can’t say for sure what motivates other people, but I am inspired to visit places that are on the cooler side (temperature-wise), that have rich history and culture, aren’t particularly crowded or over-run by the average ignoramus camera-toting, loud-mouthed incidental visitor tourists and are accessible within my (currently) not quite meager budget.

The interest generated towards places that are on my “must travel to” (and possibly live at for a few months) list have been because of similar reasons, as well as because of how good the portrayal of said places has been in travelogues and other associated forms of literature, how much media coverage that place has received and to a reasonable extent, due to the nice way in which most televised travel programs have showcased these places.

Recommendations from trusted friends whose travel sensibilities match mine have also played a huge part in choosing where to go, depending on how much time is available at hand.

I have visited quite a few places on a whim, but there has been a reasonable degree of background research that has gone in to knowing what to do when I get to a particular place so that I have my bearings correct. In that sense, I haven’t yet tread the paths that a true blue itinerant would’ve already sprinted on.

In recent times, I have had strong tendencies to want to join the travel literature bandwagon, after reaching near-saturation levels while covering the rock and allied genres music scene in my three year (and counting) stint at RSJ. I’ve not had opportunities yet, but what I have figured out is that traveling and writing (and pardon me for stating the obvious) are both integral parts of wanting to achieve that goal.

While scanning travel literature of all sizes including what I can see in popular travel magazines, to content on travel website to reading books (that are sometimes tomes in disguise) about intrepid travelers who have had a chance to eloquently express in words the entire gamut of their numerous experiences, I have noticed a strong tendency for most to romanticize a place to make it more appealing.

The opinions of travel writers about a place and their outlook towards their experiences are what shapes their prose and makes them wax eloquent about a few locations and diss the other ones completely. I have learnt that it makes immense sense to take what has been written with a minimal amount of skepticism because the grand majestic buildings described might not be the way you imagined them to be, the cozy restaurant situated in a small cobbled by-lane might be too cozy for comfort with flies running all around and so on.

Taking someone’s worded opinions as being sacrosanct and trying to re-live their travel experiences would result in massive disappointments, especially if the author in question is a major fan boy of the place he has visited, for reasons that you would not necessarily subscribe to.

What I have managed to learn from all this is that there are a few good reasons to visit a certain place and those reasons will remain constant. A subset of those reasons would comprise what I have mentioned at the beginning of this piece.

However, your outlook and what you expect out of your travel would strongly differ from mine, or that of the travel writers’ and if this distinction in individual tastes is accounted for, then the appreciation that you have for those who write about where they go to and what they do when they get there might increase beyond you merely appreciating what good wordsmiths they seem to be.

Notes About Nothing – The Gurgaon Chronicles Continued…

Hari — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 09:28:41 +0000

So I return yet again with a continuation of the ‘Notes About Nothing’ series, after spambots hogged my website bandwidth for the second month in a row. I was initially taken aback by the fact that I was getting 509-ed (getting a bandwidth exceeded error) despite having very poor traffic, but the use of some plug-ins will hopefully stem the rot.

Back to regular programming.

Yomance: Yomance, a word I want to take credit for having invented, is new age short-term romance that a couple willingly gets into, knowing fully well that it will not / should not culminate in marriage. Its short term romance for the yo-generation. I am too old school for Yomance and I still feel like being head over heels in love with one person forever, the trials and tribulations that go with the search notwithstanding.

So the basic classification for relationships would have to be in the following order, just to give you a sense of where Yomances lie:

One night stand << Fling << Yomance << Long Term Relationship << Marriage

Delhi Airport Fundas: I like airports in general. I like train stations too. And airplanes and trains. I detest bus stands. That is beside the point.

The Delhi airport has had fond memories associated with it. On 23rd December 2009, I took a last minute flight from there to Hyderabad to attend my first job interview at B-school.

The flight cost me a bomb and I later realized that with a little more money, I could’ve made two (yes TWO) round trips to Singapore on Tiger Airways. Sadly Tiger Airways only operates from four South Indian airports and Chomland residents have no luck in this regard.

At the airport, I pleaded with all the airlines to give me a flight ticket to Hyderabad at the earliest possible and one ticket opened up on a Kingfisher flight at the last minute. I gave the ticket lady a big hug when she handed over my grossly expensive ticket and every time I end up at the departure lounge to head out of Delhi, I feel like dropping in and saying hi, except for that she’d have forgotten or felt that I was being creepy. Sometimes its nicer to let memories remain so.

Frantic phone calls to our placement department, to friends in Hyderabad and Delhi and elsewhere, shaving without soap / shaving cream / hot water at the airport after picking up a safety razor from some shady kirana store across the road and a random conversation with a guy who had Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea decals on his backpack (I told him he’d get beaten up in every major city in the UK) later, I was on the flight.

As I’d blogged before, I made it for the interview on time and did well, but the job went to a better candidate who rejected the offer, went onto win the Chairman’s award on campus for our batch and has since been elevated to levels of studness regular people like me can only dream of.

Weather Woes: I was in Bangalore, Mysore and Madras over the past fortnight, to attend two weddings and chill out in Mysore. The weather there is so beautiful and so pleasant that I am shocked at how I had taken what I had for granted. The complete absence of a miasma-like feeling that has stifled me up here in the NCR was extreme relief.

Mundu Madness: Wearing a is the best thing one can do in the sweltering heat of Madras. My friend’s wedding was being held during the time that the place was at its hottest and wearing boxers and a mundu with a belt tied strategically to avoid any potentially embarrassing incidents was the best decision. Ever. A certain Sangram Bhalla would no doubt strongly agree.

RSJ Fundaes: Its been more than three years since I’ve begun writing for RSJ and now, most saturdays when I am not traveling out of Delhi, which is most saturdays, I have time to get to the office here and sit and get some work done towards content for the magazine. The new initiatives for the year ahead as envisioned by RSJ are promising and will certainly do a lot for the music scene.

I had a few posts in mind, but they require a lot of time and a lot more contemplation for proper construction and presentation. In other news, I just read my last column post on RSJ only to realize that I’d made a mention of ‘Strategic Innovation Management’ in passing. I don’t remember writing this column because it was in between exams during my last few days on campus and I guess the content in the piece is a reflection of my state of mind then.

Summer Storm 2010 – Lamb of God LIVE in India!

Hari — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 06:07:56 +0000

So it finally happens.

After much speculation and debate, the next big live concert in India will play host to Lamb of God.Come 15th May 2010, our very dear Palace Grounds in Bangalore will have Lamb of God performing to a packed audience.

This event is being brought to you by Overture India, a brainchild of Arpan Peter and Vinay Venugopal.

My good buddy, Prasad Bhat, who recently started a graphics design firm, Graphicurry is responsible for the cool design of the Overture India site.

For further details related to ticket prices, news, updates and other exclusive information, watch this space!

Edit: Rolling Stone India is the official magazine partner for Summer Storm 2010. Exclusive information, news, updates and such are, as a result, not privy to owner of this blog. My bad.

IIT M Saarang 2010 Update

Hari — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 10:05:15 +0000

Last heard from the organizers at IIT Madras, Hammerfall, the Swedish power metal band was scheduled to perform at this year’s edition of Saarang. You’d have no doubt read about it online in one of many websites, including, possibly an article here.

In a recent development, it turns out that it is not only Hammerfall, but also Skid Row that will be performing that same evening on that same stage. These guys have managed to pull off a masterful coup and signed on two bands to play on the same evening!!

No Sebastian Bach, but instead, Johnny Solinger will do the honours. Two big bands on the same stage on a breezy January night in Chennai is ~~probably one of~~ definitely the coolest thing to have happened so far as Saarang 2010 is concerned!

Hopefully, circumstances will give me an opportunity to take a day out to cover the event. Fingers are crossed!

Hammerfall at Saarang 2010

Hari — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 23:41:20 +0000

The Swedish metal invasion at IIT Madras is on in full force this year as well, with Gothenburg based power metal act Hammerfall being the main performing act. This, followed by last year’s brilliant concert featuring Opeth, about which reams has been written (even by Mikael Åkerfeldt who had a mouthful to say about the whole main sponsor related drama that took place on stage) along with truckloads of other Scandinavian bands coming over to the sub-continent is good for the metal fans out here in our country.

Now Hammerfall isn’t exactly the first band that comes to mind when people think of Swedish metal / power metal and I haven’t honestly heard much thanks to having discovered them a couple of months ago via last.fm, which is why I’m only familiar with songs from their last album, ‘No Sacrifice, No Victory’.

However, their music seems like its good fun to listen to at a concert, and the show at Saarang 2010 should be a good gig to attend. I’m just wondering how many people will now claim to be die-hard fans of Hammerfall, and this should be fun to watch.

@The Devoted Reader – your email address is not working. Please email me. Thanks!

2009: The Year That Was

Hari — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 18:54:06 +0000

2009 has been quite a year for me and when I am long gone and my great-great-grand kids want to read what I’ve written (yeah, your great-great-gramps is teh_pwnage!), they need to be shown how cool I was, even if it means writing something completely untrue and fabricated, as some part of this post might turn out to be.

Having said that, most of what actually happened in my life last year is stranger than fiction and hence needs no more fraudness to be introduced for this post to sound weirder. If you’re cheesed off by the post already, here’s wishing you a grand 2010 and goodbye.

Before you go, please check out Aadisht’s stunning preview of 2010 which definitely warrants a read. His years in preview are now a regular feature of his bleg.

Moving on to 2009 in review for me in person. A lot of condensation has taken place thanks to the fact that minutiae needn’t be documented, in the interest of time and space and most of all, your attention span and sanity.

January:

Went to IIT Madras and interviewed Opeth for the cover story for Rock Street Journal. Got promoted from Correspondent to Staff Writer, though I can’t really tell the difference. The latter title definitely sounds cooler. Never felt more powerful as part of the fourth estate till date, except for while shamelessly flashing press card before boarding domestic flights and getting the aisle seat all the time.
Got two videos (video 1 and video 2) of me dancing along with Gaurav Basu and Abhinav Yogesh, vocalist and drummer respectively of the Bangalore based Inner Sanctum. It is to be noted that TASMAC shops disbursing alcohol in Tamil Nadu close at 10 PM, and our shenanigans were executed in complete sobriety due to the frustration of not having consumed alcohol, as opposed to being inebriated as it might seem in the video. Potential recruiters, please note that this showcases my light side which might come in handy as a future manager in your esteemed firm.

February:

Admitted to the Indian School of Business’ class of 2010. Sheer joy at not having to work for a year. Eleven months down the line, I realize I’ve worked more in college than in fifty five months at the office. Go figure.

March:

Last day at work on 20th March, and the anticlimax accompanying the end of my work at the only company that had me employed made me feel grateful that I could switch companies sans emotion. Being in the system long enough afforded a smooth exit, with all friendly faces helping out with the exit formalities. I still miss my close friends at work, and the fellowship (as we called our elitist clique of ‘cool’ people) shall reconvene again!
Packed and moved back from Bangalore to Mysore, only to move out again in ten days. Had to bid goodbye to all the good friends I had made over five years in the city which I had just begun referring to as home, along with Mysore. Packing and moving sucks.
Attended a wonderful surprise birthday party for someone. Surprise birthday parties shall never go out of fashion.

April:

Turned 26. Was unemployed. Did nothing on my birthday except go out for an hour to meet an old college friend. One of my most uneventful and yet best birthdays till date.
Finished loan formalities. For the first ever time in my life, I owed someone money that I wasn’t in a position to repay in the short term. I’ve still not come to this bridge that I foresee will be a long and arduous one to cross.
Joined Indian School of Business’ class of 2010 to become a post-graduate student of management. Yeah, this is most of what my life currently revolves around till date, for better or worse.

May:

Settled into college life, made friends, played pranks like this one and had a lot of fun. Got adjusted to parties, long hours of working / studying, spending atrocious amounts of time in front of my laptop, answering phone calls like I had to go take an urgent dump and other things that management grad students are usually supposed to do.
Wore a suit for the second time in my life to get a picture clicked for the student handbook. The contortions involved in getting me to pose that way, as can be seen in my linkedin profile can’t ever be replicated, unless under conditions of threat to my life. The first time I wore a suit was for my B-school interview in December 2008.

June:

The end of the world as I knew it and I felt fine. Correction. I’ll feel fine in due time, and write another cathartic post like this one and things will be brighter and sunnier again. Until then that far away look where one focuses away into infinity and reminisces about the past when one’s mind wanders shall remain.
The rest of June 2009 remains a blur.

July:

Getting used to the academic grind, with B-school keeping me busy enough to not even blog, try as hard as I wanted to. Oh, and I got to be President of the Music Club, which meant that anytime someone’s audio equipment malfunctioned, I was asked to come around and tinker with the wires to set it right, or to play top Bollywood hits music at parties where a DJ was unaffordable, or compile playlists for the most randomest of occasions. In all this confusion, a band was formed on campus (a rock band, no less!) and it was called Conjoint. Bwuahahahaha.

August:

This was the month of theories when out of class creativity was at its peak, and a new genre of music was discovered, the Samson ratio was discovered and the Infinitely Prolonged Social Interaction theory was formulated. This theory, in some other time and some other place might’ve catapulted me to meteoric fame, but alas, all it got me was a blog post with a reasonable number of hits. I’ve made peace with that. I’m so easy to please.
New nicknames were given to people, some of which will stick for life. Conjoint made its debut performance amidst as little fanfare as was possible.

September:

Seems like I’d amassed enough street cred to be considered a judge for rock shows and hence was invited by Xtreme Sports Bar in Hyderabad over three weekends to judge Hyderabad bands doing their stuff. Got acquainted with the music scene in Hyd as a result.

October:

Tried hitting on a girl at a bar when I was judging the final of the aforesaid set of rock shows. My extent of hitting on was to make hajjar eye contact and then not go up and make conversation. At this rate, I might as well hope and pray that females realize that striking conversation with men is part of the whole women’s lib thing that they’re so proud of displaying or that GSBs can convert easily to Buddhism, whichever comes later.
Spent a wonderful week in Hampi / Anegundi working on an internship project to develop rural tourism and improve the small scale handicrafts industry in the region. Fell in love with the idea of watching sunsets while walking in paddy fields, listening to Sigur Ros.

November:

Website told jai, MadMan Madhu Menon repaired it for me. God bless him.
Fell into the standard issue honeytrap that most stupid people in an educational institute fall for, where someone’s charm is used to extract work from someone else. Guess which of the two parties I was!

December:

Won a free phone at a quiz. The Nokia 5310 is my first phone with camera, mp3 ringtones, bluetooth, video and a wallpaper that moves!!!!!!!!
Monkee got engaged, among other fun events that took place on December 13th. His phone bill has since quadrupled and his joy has increased asymptotically. Touchwood, good luck and God bless.
Opened as part of Conjoint for The Raghu Dixit Project.
Got shortlisted for a job interview, did crazy things including rush from Noida to the Delhi airport in peak traffic with no less than six near-death instances, beg and plead for a last minute flight ticket from New Delhi which cost a bomb, hugged the Kingfisher attendant who booked me the ticket and showed up in time for the interview. Many days and rounds later, I got a reject. Such is life. The effort made it memorable. Also, it doesn’t snow in Thailand. So there.
The first of my cousins on my Mum’s side got married. She’s the second, age-wise. Guess which moron is the eldest? Yeah, scary. I know.
Spent New Year’s eve half asleep while watching TV at home. The tame end to the year was as blissful and relaxing as it could get.

2009 will be relegated to the pages of personal history and has earmarked many changes in my life, good and bad. However, like each year that has passed in living memory, it will, without doubt be yet another year that has gone in shaping life as I know it. If you’ve read so far, Happy New Year once again!

*post fades away into the distance, with Green Day’s ‘Time of Your Life’ playing softly in the background*

Battle of the Gultland Bands

Hari — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 21:05:08 +0000

Turns out that my having written for RSJ for three years has given me enough street cred to be able to judge a music competition.

I was asked to judge some music competition at the office for a bunch of campus recruits quite some time ago, and I assumed that I would be so bored out of my wits that I went there, armed with a Superman comic as a failsafe option.

This time around, Xtreme Sports Bar is hosting the Battle of the Bands competition in association with Kingfisher, and I was asked to be one of the three judges for the event, thanks to some plugging in by a friend on campus who can afford to go to the place on a regular basis, unlike the poor owner of this site.

Consequently, my sunday evenings are booked until the end of September as I will have to go to three different bars to play judge. Today, I was witness to performances by six bands and the next sunday will have me see a few more play. The semi-finals are going to be held on 27th and the finals will be on the 4th of October. The finals will have Parikrama playing live, and I was asked to be there as well, but I will have to head to Anegundi to hang onto the back of a loaded truck for dear life.

The performances today had bands named Cerebral Assassin, The Turning Brain (?), Fame, Karmageddon, Metaphor and Chameleon. While two of the bands were tight and played real well, it was quite evident that a couple others had just practiced for two days before the gig and hence didn’t really put up a great show.

I relate to the latter because that is exactly what I end up doing for my exams as well, but lamenting about my pathetic academic performance is material for another post, at a time when it will not matter much, hopefully.

Somehow, American Fucking Idol seems to have influenced people a lot, in so far as competition judging is concerned. I am the old-school types, and my style, if you will, is more of the TVS Sa Re Ga Ma types, where I make notes and write down stuff and then just inform whoever needs to be told about how I have graded the bands.

The other two judges were having tons of fun and decided to trip on the bands and roast them. It was quite fun to watch for the spectators, but not so much for the bands getting verbally bashed up. All in all, I kept my mouth shut all through and I even had a line prepared to say in case I would be asked to speak, for whatever reasons be. “Please read Rock Street Journal, India’s leading Rock and Metal magazine of the world!” is all I would’ve said.

If you’re in Hyd and you’re reading this and you don’t mind listening to loud music at a pub and don’t mind bands getting roasted, please do feel free to make your presence felt as the Gultland bands vie with each other for a 12 gig contract with Kingfisher. You might even spot me there. If I’ve done my mid-terms decently, please walk over and say hi, and I will try not to punch you in the face.

Au revoir!