The Days Of Our Lives

Presently, the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival is going on in Mumbai. Its an annual cultural festival which takes place around January/February and deals with music, dramatics, dance and cinema. Its one of the things which makes Mumbai the city it is. I'd never gone there in my 3 years of living in Mumbai but I was determined to attend it this year knowing that my association with this amazing city is going to end soon. :( So, today, my friends and I decided to go all the way down to south Mumbai to attend a rock concert. My actual blog entry starts now.

Heres a confession - I completely love rock music. People might say that rock music is nothing but noise. I strongly disagree. I've been hooked on rock for as long as I remember. Sure, as a little kid I used to watch some stupid pop music videos on TV and sing along and all. But what do little kids know anyway? :P This semester, I've taken up a course on Indian Classical Music Appreciation just to get back to my roots. Still waiting to see how that works out. I love the lectures though - you enter class to find music being played and the professor himself starts singing too - its almost like going to a pub. :)

Another thing I completely love is driving. The thrill of racing a mean machine on smooth terrain overwhelms me. Although, I prefer the roads of my hometown Delhi, Mumbai highways offer a pleasurable ride too, esp. at night. And Mumbai being the city that never sleeps, I've had enough oppurtunities to do a lot of night driving. Going to the rock concert meant driving all the way down to south Mumbai, about an hour drive. All throughout, we had loud rock music blaring from the car speakers - in anticipation.

We reached there to find a crowd of about 60 people, most of them being elderly men who I'm sure were just wandering about and decided to see what the fuss was all about - very unlike a rock concert crowd. But as time passed, the hardcore rockers came in, wearing the classic rock concert uniform - black tee with jeans.

Now the concert. Two Indian bands were to perform - a local band, Zero, and a quite popular Delhi-based band called Parikrama. The show started with Zero pelting out some pop numbers and some rockish items. Obviously the crowd was not pleased. The hardcore rockers started moshing - hurling themselves at each other and the crowd. The elder people looked all shocked. I'm sure moshpits didn't exist some 20 years in the past. Infact I learnt about moshing only recently so can't really blame them. For someone who is unaware of the concept of moshing, those rockers must've looked like drunk kids trying to pick a fight. :P And oh, there was this one dude who was trying to do all sorts of Indian classical dances when the music was being played. To some, he was far more interesting than the band.
Zero ended their performance and then out came Parikrama. And man oh man, things got rocking all of a sudden. Anyone who's heard a decent share of rock music would tell you how talented their lead singer is - not only can he imitate the high-pitch voice of the AC/DC singer but also flawlessly render amazing covers of Coldplay/Pink Floyd numbers. Simply awesome. Another unique thing about Parikrama is that their band includes a tabla player and a violinist. A violinist!!! Its like an entire orchestra!!! The band knew what the crowd wanted and made sure they delivered. Another amazing thing about them is that all their original songs are available on their website for free download. My advice to anyone reading this is to check out their song called "Open Skies". Its mostly a violin instrumental but awesome nevertheless.

Do notice the lack of synonyms in this post and the excessive use of the words "awesome" and "amazing". Mind-numbness is one of the after-effects of attending a rock concert I guess. Other after-effects include neck ache from the head-banging, sore feet from the jumping about, body ache from the moshing, a splitting headache from all the loud noise, complete loss of one's voice from all the singing along loudly and loss of atleast 5 kgs of body weight (which I consider a good thing, so its accepted). All in all an amazing concert...simply awesome!! :P

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