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.