Monday, October 02, 2006

Be it Another brick in the wall or smells like teen spirit or sometimes even
fade to black, even if it is a compulsive hearing because of my brother's continous
blurting of the same, I have always been surrounded by a lot of good quality music
. of course! when u have loads of 'tera tera tera surooor' and 'where's the party tonight'
pouring out of the radio channels in one form or the other that even 3 different channels dedicated to good Indian music have scored a good deal of -ve points with me... so much so that I some time start to wonder if there is any art left indian music, or everything has been turned into Pepsi/Coke: good to taste, but full of harmful pesticides (and we still drink it! after all Amir Khan asks us to).

Mr Qutubuddin Aibak (he who? he is the dude who made that roundish bulding in delhi that we occasionally see on post cards/maps of delhi... )kinda came to my rescue and took me to a place long forgotten by me and my friend(we meet most weekends ,sit in a mall sip coffee in barista/cafe coffee day and discuss the world and how monotonous has it become). It was the less popular The Hindu (TOI is most read) that ran an ad for some thing called the Qutub Festival. Organised by the Govt of Delhi, this festival even offered Bus rides from a point near by! So job less is this festival that to woo the crowds
, they have to offer rides! and btw, the festival was free for all. Since we were anyhow pretty balse about the the music we wd hear at a coffee shop/ Mall (they know nothing more than Kenny G or if its good luck then Pt SHiv Kumar Sharma's son) we went to the fest, trying to be late coz it wdnt anyhow start at 630 u know(IST), we reached there by 745 i guess and saw that they had laid the path to the festival's performance area with good old fashioned diyas! the path looked like sprinkled with tiny stars! the idea was a very welcome change from the neon lights/ trees loaded with electric bulbs that show u the path(and the stones u watch out for) ever so lifelessly.

On the stage were some quawwals that i thought had long died and maybe they have been called here to bid farewell to this form of music. It would have been best if Some Himesh Reshamia would have felicitated them for their long innings. what started after that was out simply a period full of intense rousing music that engrossed us totally. theirs was a music that had the madness of a fanatic, intensity far greater than of any bollywood movie I have ever watched, so much so that before I knew, I was head banging to a music that was miles apart from Rock to which head banging is usually associated to. what was common for both, was quality. Maybe we need to run that extra mile to the village and taste the raw material before it is manufactured into a one taste liked by all cuisine. maybe lets get out of the wall as all in all we are nothing but bricks in that wall...