WOMAD 2005.

The World of Music And Dance 2005 comes to Singapore and we were there today.

And so was Apache Indian, a few feet away from us.

Ironic, really, that the event ended with Apache Indian; his performance brought back old memories, but his was the first album I bought after "researching" the music genre. It was, perhaps, my first induction into a sub-culture; there was a time when a friend with similar interests and I had to "explain" why we preferred Chok There to the top Bollywood hit of the day.

Let's just say I was amazed at myself when I realised that I could sing the entire lyrics of some of his old songs. Oh the things we do in school, just to be cool.

In the light of us revisiting our hitherto dominant, but now extinct, idolation for Apache Indian, it is, perhaps, instructive to glance at today's Astrocenter.com prediction:

You might come to closure today concerning a difficult event in your past, Akshay. Maybe there was a distressing event that happened to you in your childhood or more recent years. Traumas like that can leave deep scars. You might find yourself asking "Why did this happen to me?" when there isn't any good answer. Today you will be able to welcome a spirit of peace and forgiveness and put these old ghosts to rest.

Heh. I leave it to you to decide if listening to desi-rap in an Indian public school is, indeed, traumatic. Alamandrax would perhaps say yes, but then, because he'll also say that listening to ragamuffin is traumatic as well, you can't go by just that.

There was much much more of course, we had even folks from Timbuktu performing in, amusingly enough, classic rock. Certainly didn't feel as empty as their name sounds.

As you might expect in these post-911 times, there were people who derisively called their music as terrorist-rock, cynically wondering if they were bad-mouthing the audience through their (to us) incomprehensible lyrics. We, naturally, don't share such sentiments; in fact, we actively condemn such thoughts, we recognise the Touareg people's suffering has no relation to terrorism in the Al-Qaeda sense, and realise that Tinawiren is, in fact, rebel music akin to Bob Marley's.

And there were Israelis who sing with strong Ethiopian influences.

Curiously enough, the band's website claims theirs was the top-selling album in Israel in 2002. We would like to highlight this point in greater detail, particularly to Israeli readers of feminine persuasion; it appears that our nature is such that people of musical repute and contemporary significance naturally gravitate towards us.

That is to say,

WTF?!! I TOOK A FUCKING PICTURE WITH ISRAEL'S BIGGEST POP STAR!!!!!!!! IS THAT COOL OR WHAT?!!!!

Bollywood made a presence somewhere too, albeit in a workshop on how to dance like Aishwarya Rai.

Entirely forgettable, except that the spectacle of Bollywood-dancing getting disassembled for an international audience was, hilariously heart-warming.

All in all, an enjoyable evening; that's $24 well-spent. I still don't know why the lesbian couple in front of me were giving me strange looks; I had no issues with them at all, only with the Aussie who was blocking my view, in order to show off to his girlfriend. I also don't why a bunch of Brit-desi girls became overly serious when they asked me to take their picture; you know, it is possible to continue giggling while you ask for your photo to be taken.

Still, a fantastic experience. Now Rehman has no choice but to deliver better.

Rising Sun v1.2

(Whilst being a slightly different version of an earlier Flickr upload).

Chinese characters meet a Garden Gnome Ganesha[*] on my cubicle.

[*} - (c) Yudhi-dhar, 2004.

My New Mobile.

Sitting high on technology.

Slight Modifications to the blog.

As you can probably see, we now have a flickr PhotoStream to our right; we're committing rather heavily to photo-blog from now on. I'll still post pics here as and when I like of course, but the mainstay of all our photos from now on will be my flickr page. Do keep posting your comments, either here or there; your voice needs to be heard!

Unfortunately, while your voice is a-okay, spammers' voices are not. Been a semi-major problem with spamming out here, so have now enabled captcha sign-ons for all comments; I didn't want to remove anonymous postings, and somehow think this is the best solution possible. I'll be monitoring the situation for a couple of days, and see if it is indeed workable with all.

As an added note, was beginning to hate blogger dissiparating all italicised words in the comments, so have enabled pop-up comments. Works fine in Opera even with the pop-up blocker on; am not sure how it works in other browsers. Let me know if you guys have any problems.

Urban Renewal.

Familial faces bring light to old haunts.

Fishy Business.

Street corners assert themselves.

Awaken, Singapore!

Flying high over the Straits of Malacca.

Hyderabad Road, Singapore.

Between Home and Where I Stay.

Trolley Train.

Or what you look for when you enter an airport.

On my silence for the past few days.

_{(From Yahoo naturally; the pic will go the moment Yahoo takes it down)}

Secularism: The Essay.

The Indian Express has announced a INR 50,000 (==S$2000) prize for the most coherent chain of thoughts on the delicate issue of secularism as it relates to the world today.

We gracefully accept the challenge and dedicate this weekend to our quest for finding our lost literary glory.

_{(Damn, too bloddy subtle. Let me relive some memories in a larger scale for old time's sake.)}

Live Musical Experiences

So we ended up watching Jagjit Singh perform live at (the unfairly maligned) Esplanade yesterday. Quite a mesmerising performance, really, and not just for Mr Singh's or his troupe's talent, but for the manner in which he got the audience to participate in his creative process.

Indeed:

"When you sing a song in a studio, the style remains the same. If you sing it as it is, there is no andaaz [individual style]. On a live show, you get an opportunity to present each song differently. The audience reaction and sound effects make it possible. Sometimes I try and sing the same line six different ways."

Which is precisely what made the concert so beautiful yesterday. I'm too sleepy to expand on this at the moment, but there was a clear demonstration of some fascinating Saussure-ian concepts at play last evening. I could, perhaps, expand on these thoughts tomorrow.

Let me just say this for the moment though: it is, clearly, our tragic misfortune that we chose to ignore our manifest role as audience to re-code the performers' messages; we have, sadly, not healed enough to not feel cynical about messages of love, whether unrequited or not.

Remains to be seen what sort of an effect AR Rehman's Third Dimension Tour will have on us when it comes to Singapore this September. Something funny about this one, frankly; isn't anyone on stage in front of you in, by definition, three dimensions?

Narratives aren't relative.

They are, in fact, deterministic; you suggest, they lead, you follow.

That's the lesson of the day today.

I love terse sentences.

I should think you do too.

Mention the word,

and everyone stands to attention.

Are we so enamoured by evolution that we are, in fact, slaves to its desires? Do we have an escape?

Tomorrow, the two worlds I live in will collide.

About time, should say.

నంగిరి ముఖము.

ఎప్పుడూ వెయ్యకూడదు. వేస్తే వెంటనే తెలుస్తుంది, నా గురించి మాట్లాడుకుంటున్నారని.

Trust your instincts.

You've got a great gift; they'll always lead you on the right path.

Ironic, isnt it.

We seem to have the best communication with those who dont speak English as their primary language.

Finest Moments.

From the screenplay of Apollo 13:

NASA DIRECTOR
- I know what the problems are, Henry. This could be the worst disaster NASA's ever experienced.

GENE KRANTZ (FLIGHT DIRECTOR - WHITE)
- With all due respect, sir. I believe this is gonna be our finest hour.

One of my favourite motivational quotes ever. Always turns out to be true each time I try and recollect it. :-)

You know something is wrong with life,

when the cabbie on your way home offers a five cent rebate "for all the hard work [you] put in".

It doesn't have to be this karma-ic each time.

With sufficient planning, and enough dedication, it is, by definition, possible to succeed.

A Tropical Tunnel.

The Heart of the Deccan.

Goddess Saraswati

Bhangra Red.

Red Vine Vinagrette

||Gyan|| - US And Us.

To understand the American point of view, stop seeing the world as black and white.

Instead, see it as blue and red.

Chess: Where the Black evenly matches the White.

The Flame of the Urban Forest.

The Long March Home.

Technocolorful Dreams.

The Telecommute.

Thousands of Movies Like This?

So I got my wish, and finally got to see an Indian movie that explains how a business grows, just that the venture was a FERA-Era relic that relied more on licences than branding to survive.

But then, Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (Thousands of Wishes Like This) did more than to explain the entrepreneural spirit before Suzuki; it explained, or tried to explain, how democratic India devolved itself into a banana republic in those wasteful Emergency years. The forced sterilisation programme wasn't of able-bodied young men, but of a young, adolescent nation still trying to find its voice; it rationally rams down your throat that, when you don't police an authoritarian government, the only two clashing political ideologies are a brutal application of force and the lack of it. Our generation's greatest triumph, then, is not just that we can strike for mundane reasons, but that we can discuss socialism's, and militant-communism's, futility, in a mundane setting. Staggering to imagine that this wasn't so a mere twenty-five years back.

However, what is, indeed, truly interesting is not just the film's actual narrative, but its localised-narrative (petit-recit), as it were. It is true, you begin to think, as the movie suggests, it is possible to see two India's; one where heroines are pale-skinned, and wear what the front-benchers want, and another where heroines are brown-skinned, and wear what the character wants. One speaks chaste Hindi, while the other speaks an easy mix of English, Hindi and, amusingly enough for the movie, pidgin Telugu. One is known to half the world, and is a billion-rupee industry; the other is known only to film-buffs, and still sometimes seeks governmental help to survive. One is seductive, the other is attractive. One is an aspiration, another an inspiration.

I'll leave you to muse on that cinematic irony.