Firstly, hats off to Anbumani Ramadoss for his smoking rule. The two pubs I’ve been to since the ban came into effect at the start of this month have provided good experiences, because involuntary passive smokers needn’t do Neo-like manoeuvres to evade the cigarette smoke that most people would be unleashing in our direction.

Now, at Purple Haze in Mysore, on a sunday evening, there was one screen which was showing the Chelsea v/s Liverpool game, and that provided me with ample distraction while most others were watching a band named ‘TransitPoint’ play. Their lead singer, complete with dreadlocks and an American accent to boot was trying in vain to get the crowd up on their feet in order for them to mosh to the music, but despite him having asked them in no less than seven languages and in different accents and dialects, the crowd that was sitting down did not seem to want to get off its arse.

Meanwhile, in the second half of the game, I was totally praying for Ashley Cole to get red-carded, and was rooting for Liverpool since I like them more than I like Chelsea. The match ended with a Liverpool victory, and I am wondering why nobody has yet taken the initiative to have a sports pub in Bangalore. I hope someone reads this post of mine and has enough money to make this happen.

Band after band played, including one named ‘Corrode’ (or was it Korrode? One can’t really say how the Balaji Telefilms induced spelling rules might’ve influenced the general population), and one more named ‘Kashmora’, aside from the dreadlocks singer’s band, ‘TransitPoint’. One thing I liked about Kashmora was that they came up with a song for Vijender Singh, and dedicated it to him.

Considering how Abhinav Bindra is now in love with a massive television instead of falling for one of the million women wooing him, I guess it is only fair to shift focus towards Akhil Kumar and Vijender Singh, who haven’t yet started embarassing themselves by appearing in ads where they proclaim their love for underwear brands, or for Chyawanprash bottles, or God forbid, other products that you can’t possibly be in love with.

Now, all these aforementioned bands were asking the crowd to get up, come to the front, and groove. But their pleas fell on deaf ears. The crowd didn’t know their music, and while there were a few enthusiastic headbangers out there, their enthusiasm, I am certain can be attributed more to their blood alcohol content rather than their interest in the music being played.

Once these bands were through, on came this band named ‘Venator’. One of the things that makes this band stand apart from most other bands in Bangalore is the fact that they have a female vocalist and a female bassist. The female vocalist puts growling vocals. Yes, you read that right.

If you know Angela Gossow, then it isn’t really that hard to imagine someone else following up and performing in the same style, but I guess not many people in Mysore who were present at Purple Haze last evening had heard Arch Enemy.

So, when Venator started playing, and the vocalist began growling, word spread in the crowd like wildfire. ‘Machha, chick vocalist is growling.’ ‘Huh? WTF?’. People began surging forward in droves, crowding around the performance area, and as a result, the only band which didn’t want a crowd gathering up in front when they were performing, ended up having one. Or maybe they did, and didn’t particularly have to ask for it to happen.

However, they wanted the crowd to go back, and one could hear repeated growls from the vocalist, who was asking them to go back to their seats. However, there’s only so much of growling that anyone can make out in the absence of a lyrics sheet to boot, and consequently, the crowd stayed till the next band came on.

Watching a female vocalist growl can be a somewhat emasculating experience, personally. However, the crowd did seem to have a good time. So there.

In any case, if you’ve read everything till the end of this post, here’s wishing you a happy and prosperious Deepavali, with lots of cash spent, lots of sweets eaten and child labour-free fire crackers burst. Also, please clean up after you’re done with whatever celebration you’re planning to indulge in.

For those unaware – yes, Mysore has pubs. Shocking but true. Sadly, it is going the Bangalore way, and while the ban on live music in places serving alcohol continues unabated in Bangalore, Mysore seems to have been unaffected by it all. The branch of Purple Haze in Mysore is hosting a rock / metal fest showcasing eighteen bands over the weekend before Diwali.

I had been there last evening to check out a few of the bands, including Crucifix Guide, Today’s Special and Ston’d (about whom I’ve written in the upcoming issue of RSJ) and during the whole time I was watching them bands perform live, I could only think of how the guy behind the sound console was not mixing the sound properly into the PA (public address), as a result of which the volumes of individual instruments weren’t being balanced correctly.

In some cases, you couldn’t hear the vocalist who was being drowned out by the guitar tones. The bass guitar was not heard in a few instances. If a band had two guitarists, their volumes weren’t balanced properly.

The guy in charge of sound at the pub couldn’t entirely be blamed either. This is because he is not aware of their setup, and isn’t aware of how the instruments and vocals are interspersed in each song, and whether there needs to be any modifications in the sound levels done across different songs. It isn’t his business either. All he needs to do is to keep all instruments at certain preset levels to ensure a minimum sound output that each band can adjust to. Think of it as being akin to the common minimum program for bands.

If each band has a dedicated sound engineer who knows all their songs perfectly, he can either take charge of the sound console, or assist the main sound guy in adjusting levels, to negate the most obvious complaint that most bands have of how the sound sucked.

For sure, a sound engineer is way more important to a band than even a manager is. At least in the initial phases of its existence. Unless of course, the manager can also double up as a sound guy.

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.

I confess to cheaply conforming to LOL speak in my post ‘Hai World’. Additionally, some of the tech offices of the more chilled-out kind in the US use this lingo in official communication or while checking in code into the version control repository. LOL Dogs and LOL Code are further spin-offs of this phenomenon.

I would encourage all those willing, able and enthusiastic enough to use LOL speak in their lingo, so long as they don’t mess with regular english spelling and only tamper with the grammatical aspects of the language.

Moving on, Tech Speak is a relatively lesser known malaise plaguing the Indian IT industry. Instances of Tech Speak have effects on virtually every IT office within the country, but incidents of its break out have been brushed under the carpet and despite awareness of its presence, no remedial actions have been taken to stem its growth or to quell it once and for all.

Examples of Tech Speak are too many to be exhaustively listed here, but some of the gems that one can come up with are as follows:

‘I can’t able to access the central server.‘
‘He is bad at communication. He can’t able to speak properly.‘ (Reason stated for turning down a person’s candidature during an interview.)
Our country national anthem are voted by UNESCO as best. I am having proud tears of joy.

Tech speak is prevailent in all IT offices, and is something that can be remedied among the nicer guys who ail from it by correcting them nicely and guiding them appropriately. The sad part of this is that there are enough bozos and clowns around who think no end of themselves and their ‘communication skills’, who are hit by this in an even worse fashion, and are therefore past the point of salvaging.

I am highly certain that ‘fraandship‘, popularized by Orkut, is also something that originated from Tech Speak.

The first step towards addressing this is to become self-aware of its presence and acknowledging it. One way is to embrace Tech Speak much like LOL Speak has been adopted. Now, if you feel that LOL Speak is cool and Tech Speak isn’t, you’re a prudish one-dimensional wannabe. When we make Tech Speak cool enough, more people will notice it, and those that are not lazy enough will try to remedy it.

Additional measures to keep Tech Speak in check can be put into place. I had come up with this idea of creating a simple software, appropriately named ‘Tech Speak, given to firangs who work with us Indians, for them to understand the nuances of our language.

This software will act similar to Babelfish and have two fields:

• What the techie says:
• What the techie means :

Filling up the first one and pressing enter will give out the corresponding string in coherent English, thereby eliminating all possible communcation gaps.

Lastly, I recently overheard someone singing a Kylie Minogue song in Tech Speak:
‘I just can’t able to get you out of my head….’

What can I say, Tech Speak rocks!

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.

The list below is not exhaustive, and will be updated as and when more stuff is published.

Article on Sunday Jams in Bangalore – Music lovers of Bangalore may miss their monthly dose of original music in earnest, unless the Sunday Jammers get back their ‘Music Strip’ in Cubbon park and are allowed to tune in again, uninterrupted..

Article on Dogmatone Records – DogmaTone Records, a Bangalore-based record label which released its first album in 2007, aims to nurture niche musicians who have smaller audiences..

Skimpy‘s Bangalore Photowalk – A young Bangalorean finds a novel way of indulging his passion for walking, photography, sightseeing and meeting new people all in one activity. Introducing, the Bangalore PhotoWalk. .

Rock Ethos promotional piece – On 10 February, Rock Ethos, a free-entry rock music festival and Bangalore’s answer to the Great Indian Rock festival (New Delhi) and Independence Rock (Mumbai) will be held at the Palace Grounds starting from about 12 noon.

Musicians Sans Frontiers – Hari Shenoy writes about a New Year-eve performance on the outskirts of Bangalore where David Moszkowicz from France and K Raja from our very own Bull Temple Road came together. .

This officially earmarks the longest voluntary relationship I have ever had in my life. Either party could’ve broken up at will, but both of us have weathered many storms together and have stuck on, for some reasons best known only to the both of us, while most other reasons for aforesaid situation remain significantly inexplicable.

This NaN is going to focus on the memories I have had of September 1st over the past five years, and for sure, it has been quite interesting in more ways than I could have previously imagined.

For the first ever time in my life, I fell asleep in something akin to a class, because the person who was giving us the corporate presentation could as well have been spraying valium through an atomizer four inches away from my nostrils. In addition to my acute somnolence, I had also been, as I had mentioned previously, unwell, and the medicine that I’d been prescribed had given me a light tremor in my right hand, and for one of the first ever times in my life, I was scared as hell about whether I’d ever benormal again.

The doctor’s reassurance about it being a reaction to some expectorant tablet did nothing to remedy the situation, and it was only after I got better and I was able to write properly did I heave a huge sigh of relief.

I had been to the office a fortnight prior to my joining date, on 18th August to hunt for accommodation that was close to where I had to work. Seeing the amount of dirt, dust, traffic and the accompanying madness and mayhem was too much of a shock for me, given that Mysore was diametrically opposite insofar as the state of affairs on the roads were concerned.

Three days after the entire rigmarole began, I had called my Mum up and told her that I wanted to quit and open a grocery store in Mysore, or teach in my college and I’ve had constantly recurring thoughts of quitting work ever since, but the idea has been mulled over so much that its now relegated to that part of me that tends to over-romanticize trivial situations and circumstances.

Its been four years, and, as is quite evident, I still haven’t quit.

Music, which was such an important part of my life, had also been relegated to oblivion.

In the last week of August 2005, I contracted bronchopneumonia, and as a consequence spent the first anniversary of my starting life as a working professional in bed with a fever of 104 F, getting more pale and gaunt by the minute, but sleeping like a baby and feeling happy about not having to work during that time.

Not the best of times, but not the worst of times either.

On the morning of September 1st, I saw two mails – one of them said I had my august salary credited to my account, and another one congratulated me for two years of work in my company. I said Meh to both, as I had said to some other formerly important stuff at the very start of the trip and continued to work, without those two mails bothering me much until a few days ago when I took a lazy stroll down memory lane.

In retrospect, that second trip changed my life for the better in more ways than I’d have imagined it would.

Nevertheless, this was quite a tame and incredibly lazy time for me, and this anniversary passed on without much ado either.

Even if I end up going home after work and just crashing after watching some arbit stuff on TV, I know that I’ll have had fun simlpy because I’ve reached a stage where I don’t give a damn about too many things, and am in a controlled free-fall mode.

I am currently listening to ‘Ettam Pattu’ which has a distinctive RHCP-ish feel to it, but then gets transformed into something else altogether as the song progresses.

I heard from my friend Prasad just a while ago that Anand Raj is not in the country, and hence their DJ / turntable Tony John will be at the helm of the vocals instead. Their myspace page also doesn’t mention Anand in it. Funny.

Edit: Turns out, Benjamin has left the band. So much for being up to date on the music scene. I think I should retire.

Well, nevertheless, Avial will be performing live at the Palace Grounds in Bangalore on 24th August 2008 as part of the Independence Rock’s Bangalore finale. I hope to be there, time and circumstances permitting.

If you think they’re your cup of tea (stew, rather), check them out. For more information, visit – http://www.independencerock.in

PS – Yours truly is in the process of writing a review for Avial’s music on Gigpad. Links will be provided, watch this space.

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.