One major issue I have had with Vasantotsav in the past is Nana Patekar compering – which is always crass and totally lacking in class. The compere this time was not exactly brilliant, but was better than Nana Patekar on any day.

I missed the first day on account of not being in town. A little sad about that as I was really looking forward to seeing the Shahid Pervez and Rashid Khan jugalbandi.

The second day, had Swapan Chaudhary on tabla and a fusion concert with a number of musicians.

Swapan Chaudhary played for about one and a half hours with  one sarangi player (can’t recall his name right now). He demonstrated a few typical phrases from the Lucknow school and a few phrases as played by past greats like Ustad Moinuddin Khan and Ustad Abid Hussain Khan. He seemed a little out of touch and missed the starting beat a couple of times, but overall the performance was quite good.

The highlight of the day for me was the fusion concert. It had Rahul Deshpande on vocals, Shashank Subramanian on flute, George Brooks on saxophone, Vijay Ghate on tabla, a percussionist whose name I can’t remember (he has apparently arranged music for a number of people) and Rahul Solapurkar narrating. The theme was creating a relation between the concept of the 7 chakras, the 7 colours of the rainbow  and the 7 notes in music. Rahul Solapurkar narrated in chaste marathi, something that always impresses people in Pune. There were separate compositions on each chakra. I found most of the speech a little boring but that is only because I don’t buy into this chakra stuff. The music was awesome. The jugalbandi between Brooks and Subramanyam was out of this world. Brook’s own composition was amazing as well. I really like how he blends his jazz with Hindustani classical and just goes to show how close the two genres really are.

The third and final day, I had time only to attend the first act – another fusion concert.

This one had Niladri Kumar on sitar/electric sitar, Gino Banks on the drums, Sheldon D’souza on the bass guitar, Vijay Ghate on tabla, Agnelo Fernandes on keyboard with Deepak Pandit on the violin and Sheetal Kolwalkar and troupe also performing. The show started with an amazing sound check. Gino Banks involved the crowd and honestly this was mostly a rock concert. Hardly felt like a classical or a fusion concert. Niladri Kumar was ripping it on the electric sitar, Shedlon D’Souza was playing his 6 string bass slap-pops and all, Vijay Ghate, well, he was always a rock star. The only part of the performance that I did  not like was the part with the kathak dancers. I am not the biggest fan of involving dancers in a music show as invariably one or the other has to take the short end of the stick. Moreover the use of the synth and the recorded bols really put me off. The concert returned to its awesome self after this bit and several jugalbandis and solos later, they ended with a lovely rendition of Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram.

Due to travel commitments I had to leave the venue and could not see Pandit Rajan and Sajan Mishra, but I have already seen them once at Sawai, so no real problem there.

This is the beggining of a slew of great concerts – if all goes well, I will have seen Opeth, Remember Shakti and Buddy Guy in the next 3 weeks. So hopefully I will be able to blog a lot more about music as well.

Then he would open his eyes, sit at his desk, type in his password, straighten his tie and start his day.

FC Barcelona of 2009-11 is the Chelsea of 2005-07, the Madrid of the early 2000s and Man Utd of the late 1990s. They are the team with the big stars, the team that wins everything, and hence also the team with the largest number of supposed fans whose choice of football club to support is based on the sports page headlines in TOI.

So Dear Barca ‘fans’,

I need to tell you a few things. Its for your own good. I am protecting you from gross embarassment, twitter outrage and nasty jokes.

First things first, 700 passes in a game is not indicative of how well a team played. In Barca’s case it is invariably indicative of how well they succeeded in boring the crap out of the opposition. So please stop harping on about how Barca completed more than double the passes United did. Both clubs have extremely different styles of playing. Man Utd were never competing with Barca on the ‘passes completed’ statistic. And in general, numbers don’t do justice to a game and are no way of judging one.

Also, do stop yapping on about how Barca ‘put United in its place’ – United were always the underdogs, and every United fan with half a brain will acknowledge this. This result was expected. Barca now is like Steve Waugh’s Australia – they are a team that needs to take special efforts to lose a game.

Being a die hard United fan for over 13 years,  I will be the first to say that Barca have a far superior team and man for man, United are not good enough to beat them. They have far better players in almost all positions and if they wanted, they could easily outclass United. But this was not seen at the Champions League final. All three goals were major defensive errors which schoolboys would be ashamed of. Nothing brilliant about them whatsoever. We have seen Barca’s brilliance multiple times, but this game was not one of those instances. You obviously won’t have noticed this, as the only football you have actually watched comprises the 3 minute youtube video titled “The best of Messi” made to the background music of Blur’s Song no2 by some bored Norwegian school kid.

And one last thing. Do figure out who Frank Rijkaard is.

That blasted team which has nothing to do with Pune other than its name is totally screwing Pune’s good name. Not only do the fuckers lose every damn match, they also show Pune as a city of spirit and enthusiasm, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

Pune is a city of nonchalance and maaz, and we take pride in these qualities.

It’s time to for a campaign to end this slander and to show the world that the people of Pune don’t care about almost anything in life, least of all a team owned and managed by bongs, playing its home matches in navi Mumbai and captained by a fat Punju.

For my non-marathi readers, let me start with a couple of simple definitions:

Barr (Marathi) – Okay

Barr (Puneri Marathi) – Yeah, whatever. <yawn> This random mundane activity I am indulging in right now is a grazillion times more interesting that whatever the hell it is you are saying

Well, we are a city that believes in the economy of speech. Also, we believe that maaz is the solution for everything.

Getting back to the point – the publicity campaign that the city of Pune must undertake to un-sully its name.

The ‘Barr’ campaign.

The ad can start with Imran Khan asking a Puneri girl to marry him. She is surrounded by loads of other girls who promptly reach for weapons to kill her (presumably out of jealousy). Our girl then, without looking up from her book titled ” A million fascinating facts about tar” says “Barr”

The next in the series would be a Puneri housewife sitting and watching the hundredth rerun of a TV show called “The minute by minute life story of AK Hangal” . A young man, possibly her husband comes running in and says “I just won the lottery! A billion rupees! We are rich!”. The woman, her eyes positively fixed on AK Hangal fast asleep on the screen, says “Barr”.

The next would be a group of college kids sitting around doing nothing in some place, say Calcutta. Suddenly people start running all over the place. One stops and says “Pakistan just dropped a nuclear bomb on Delhi” to which the Puneri guys say “Barr” and continue to sit there doing nothing.¹

A man sits drinking his tea while a bunch of amits come in and tell him that they, being super pissed with the MNS are soon going to kill him in a gruesome way. He continues drinking his tea and says “Barr”

A guy is sitting on some katta and staring at the sky. God shows up and says, “You have been chosen to be rewarded with anything you want.” He continues looking up and says “Barr”. God waits for a bit, shuffles his feet awkwardly and getting no further reaction heads to the bar. ²

Come on, people of Pune. Show that you don’t care. Sign up for the ‘Barr’ campaign.

_____

1. Of course this should not be seen as an effort to ‘fit in’ in Calcutta.
2. This line is possibly controversial. Ask me if I care.

I could have also blamed this on the glorious Indian traditions of taking ‘getting inspired’ very seriously. But oh well, B-school bashing is so much more fun.

In the post, Anand talks of Hollywood movies based on magazines. I thought of extending this idea to newspapers. Particularly the three in front of me right now – The Times of India, The Bombay Times and The Mumbai Mirror.

A film on the Bombay Times would start in a café owned by some Bollywood star, move on to an item number by a fat cricketer which would end with a Bollywood star in a shining silver jacket taking away the girl. Then the film would suddenly cut to a party which will feature cameos by personalities such as Laila furniturewala, Padmini Kolhapure, Zeba Kohli, Poonam Dhillon and Anuj Saxena which would end with a long speech on how homeopathy can increase India’s GDP by 200% by Dr. Batra. The end of the film would a very unintentionally funny confusion-filled scene with random Hollywood stars fluctuating on whether they want to get it on with men or women, two actresses who can’t act to save their lives having a cat fight and to end it all a computer lesson followed by an exciting climax which would end with Mallika Sherawat finding a distributor for her film.

The Mumbai Mirror film would start with a hard hitting realistic story of one man’s struggle against pot holes in Andheri east which would then go on to how a heroic cop saved a monkey from dogs. The story would then, with absolutely no warning, cut to a college romance with an IPL back-story with a Big Boss back-back-story. The film would then meander through uncomfortably detailed depiction of Suri Cruise’s 5^th Birthday and then very inappropriately head into an orgy involving actors from successful soaps from Indian TV with Mahendra Watsa presiding over proceedings which would end with an item number by a Bollywood star. The fitting climax is an exciting series of games such as Sudoku, Strikeout, Go figure played by half naked women.

The Times of India. The film would start off with a fire on a train which will then be put out by Anna Hazare only to be started again by Kapil Sibal just to piss Anna off. The fire will eventually be put out by an IPL cheerleader who will then go on to give a powerful speech about some highly questionable scientific concept. Then we will have a song set in Libya with bombs in the background with an IPL cheerleader dancing in the desert. This will then be followed by the IPL cheerleader saving a drowning kid, commenting on tax implications of the new property laws, letting out US military secrets and filing a PIL against clothes for IPL cheerleaders. The movie would then end with the inspiring story an of IPL cheerleader who acquires an 80 year old TV business and then goes on to buy the IPL and makes it into the Indian Cheering League which had Cheerleaders dancing on the ground with cricketers playing outside the boundary ropes for the entertainment of fans between songs.

Yes, I know this wasn’t all that funny. If you want real humour check out Anand’s blog, what are you doing here?

First most basic question. What is the big deal about being bisexual? It’s a personal choice. Let him be.

And second,  even if the chap did say something bad about Gandhi, say he said the Mahatma was big time into opium or something, would that change our view of him as a freedom fighter?

Dear people of India, sorry to break this to you, but Gandhi was human. Fucking live with it. Treat him with respect for things that he did for you, don’t bring his personal life into it.

George Best was a known alcoholic, chain smoker and womaniser. Do we hold that against him while naming him as one of the greatest footballers ever? No.

Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jimmy Page, Jim Morrison, The Bealtles, The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, and a hundred others from that generation – All drug addicts. Do we hold that against them while making lists of the greatest musicians ever? No.

Hell, even Bhimsen Joshi and Vasantrao Deshpande were known to be alcoholics. Yet, no one hesitates in naming them as two of the greatest Hindustani vocalists of all time.

Roman Polanski is a rapist. Does that make his movies any less awesome? No.

Their personal lives and problems are just that – personal. We can critique their work as much as we like, but none of us have a right to even pass judgement on what we think of them as people, without personal interaction.

And banning something because you don’t like what it says is absolutely ridiculous. It insults the intelligence of the entire population, by treating them like kids who cannot make their own decisions and choices about their likes and dislikes. I leave you with this wonderful talk by Philip Pullman, which was in reaction to the title of his book “ The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ” (Lovely book, I strongly recommend it)

This amusement park will be called ‘D’oh Calcutta’.

As you enter, on your left will be the first ride and it will be called “DumDum”. In this ride you will go through vast open spaces filled with nothing and then through cramped spaces filled with rude attendants shouting at you. Then you will be made to get off into a waiting area where there will be no place to sit.

Following this, you will be treated to a game called “Be the taxi driver”. Here you will be put into a simulator where you can step into the shoes of a typical Calcuttan Taxi driver. You will have to cheat passengers at every step of the way, lie blatantly about distances and of course, the most fun part of this ride, you will also get to drive like an absolute maniac and shout at innocent pedestrians for no reason whatsoever.

The first two rides may get your blood pressure up and these days of fast track courts and what not, I cannot risk being sued for heart issues. So the next ride will be nice laid back ride. In this game called “Find something to do”, you will have to roam around for hours on empty streets and look for things to do. Spoiler alert: You will find nothing. The game’s official ending is a violent argument with a zealous bong who will insist that Calcutta has everything any metro has.  But don’t tell anyone. (Do note that walking around for hours in my state of the art, artificial humidity induced chamber is bound to be good for your health.)

Then we step up the show with some fun. The next item on the list is not really a ride, but more of a game. And what’s more, it’s one of those interactive games that we all love. The game is called “Cholbe na”. Here’s how it works. You will be hooked into a computer and your task will be to think of the most ridiculous reasons to strike. Mind you, this game is designed for intellectual stimulation, and the usual day-to-day reasons like death of your relative, death of a politician of natural causes or the utter uselessness of Ravi Shastri’s commentary will not be accepted. Once you have got your ridiculous reason to strike, you will have the option to make your idea into a reality. Yes, friends, at D’oh Calcutta, we will put you in touch with the concerned people in Calcutta and you can actually make your strike a reality. Just imagine, you with red flag in hand blocking traffic on a bridge and thus disrupting the lives of millions of unsuspecting citizens all because the Shiv Sena asked Poonam Pandey not to go ahead with her noble cause. Sigh. Heaven!

Once you are rested and mentally stimulated, you are ready for the final rides. The big daddy of all rides at D’oh Calcutta. “Traffic” and “Howrah”

This first ride ie “Traffic” begins with a familiar feeling. You will feel this is a lot like the “Be a taxi driver” ride you tried before, but then you will be hit by a cacophony of car horns and shouts. People will start fighting all around you. You will then get stuck in a traffic jam for 2 hours. In this process, the driver will then proceed to take you to a local station from where you can access the next ride. Quite obviously you will be charged extra for it – but the fun factor really makes it worth it.

The “Howrah” ride starts with a comfortable local train journey with the train suddenly getting crazy crowded. Then the real excitement begins. The train suddenly slows down. You are close to Howrah. You can see the tracks and the boards. The train then takes a good twenty minutes to cover a 100 metres and finally enters the main area of the ride – Howrah. As soon as you enter Howrah, you are thrown off the train into a sea of humanity. A delightful aroma of dried fish, wet fish and human sweat greets you. As you struggle (having wild amounts of fun all the way of course) and reach the end of the platform, a voice yells into the intercom telling you that unlike the instructions provided to you earlier, you are required to go to a place about half a kilometre from your current location. You run around looking for your place. Finally after about 20 minutes of frantic running you reach the place you have to be. But alas, all this is in vain for the next part of the ride will have already left.

This ride is traditionally to be ended by loudly cursing and swearing that you will never, ever visit D’oh Calcutta again.

You will then be given some sandesh and shown the exit. And of course, you will be invited for another fun-filled day at D’oh Calcutta.

On the other hand, is facebook. I have 800 odd friends on facebook. Anything posted on facebook gets a few ‘likes’ in a few seconds. This is normally followed by a few perfunctory comments which don’t really mean anything but are made for the sake of making a comment. This tells Facebook that this is a popular story and it shows this to all my friends and all the friends of the friends who commented or liked my post. Now my post is read by over 500 people. Not just read, but discussed, critiqued and made fun of.

Thus I consider Facebook as the public forum and my blog as the personal forum. Anything that is too close to me goes on the blog without a plug anywhere, for I know only my loyal readers (a miniscule number mostly comprising of close friends) will read and not every tom dick and harry.

Isn’t it funny? The world wide web, billions strong, is more personal than a social networking site where I have less than a 1000 friends.

I loved my school (Loyola, Pune), but when I left to go to college, it was no real big deal. The same was the case when I passed out of COEP. In these places, my friends were my friends and my family was my family. I always went out to my friends but every night, I came home to my family. I went to college, but i stayed at home. At XL, my friends were my family. Even when I came back home, it was the stay at home that was temporary – the permanent was going back to XL. I guess spending every waking hour with those  people does foster some kind of nexus, and that is why I am finding it difficult to put down in words how much I am going to miss this place.

The attempt to list down the things that I will miss here is futile – there are just too many of them. Too many memorable experiences, too many great people.

Now as I sit here typing away on the laptop, sitting on my bed in room 414 for the last time, ready to leave campus, my home for the last two years, I listen to the song with seems most apt for this occasion – XL meri jaan.

Leg 1 : Pune

The first leg was Pune. It feels strange to write about Pune in my ‘Travels’ category, but we did do a lot of touristy things. Most of this leg of the trip focussed on food, for I realised that there is not much to see here if there are no concerts happening or you are not a fan of Maratha history.

We covered most of the famous joints – Coffee at Pune Coffee House, the JJ Garden vada pav guy(which in my humble opinion is the best vada pav ever),  chicken sandwiches at Marz-O-Rin, naan at  Naaz Bakery, Shrewsbury biscuits at Kayani Bakery, The king burger at Burger King, mutton crumbs at Diamond Queen, bun-maska and chai at Good Luck, filter coffee and onion uttappa at Roopali, sizzlers at Zamu’s, rabdi from shiv Kailash and even a closer-to-home option of pasta at Polka Dots. In hindsight we did miss out on the kathi kababs at Kapila and the whole experience at Shisha, but then there has to be something to do in the next trip.

We also went to COEP and sat through a BCQC session. Other than this we did nothing but sleep and laze around.

Leg 2 : Goa

We started our stay in Goa at Palolem beach in south Goa which still untouched by rampant commercialism and hence is the way Goa was meant to be – that being a place to do nothing at all.

At Palolem we stayed at a place called Cressida. They gave us coco-huts on the beach itself for a very reasonable rate of 450 per room per night. We walked out of the room straight into the sand. Pure awesomeness. It was here that we formed our gold standard for judging any place in Goa – a large Old Monk for 40 bucks. I ate sea food on practically all meals – starting with tuna sandwiches for breakfast, going on to kingfish curry for lunch and roasted red snapper for dinner. We experimented with a lot of Goan food and tried out Xacuti, Vindaloo, Cafreal and even stuffed papad. We also checked out Patnem beach and did a bit of driving around the Cancona area. After two days of doing nothing at Palolem, we headed to the north of the state, the hyper commercial, impeccably cartelised and full-of-TDCs part of Goa. We stayed at a sidey place called La Manna near Calangute beach.  There is a different attraction to north Goa. Here you are taken in by the colour, the lights and the party atmosphere. Practically everyone you see here is in the celebration mood. In north Goa, we did a bit of sightseeing. We saw the Aguada fort, which was boring to say the least. A plus point emerging from our trip to Aguada was that we stopped by at a church built in the memory of Saint Lawrence in 1630, which was totally breath-taking. We did the usual touristy thing by eating at Brittos on Baga Beach. On the first day, we also spent some time at Candolim, saw that all the shacks spectacularly fail our gold standard and left to find cheaper places to eat inland. We found this place called ‘Old Mango tree’ which gave us awesome crab and Xacuti. We also checked out the Saturday night market at Arpora which felt like a scene out of some 60’s rockumentary. All hippies selling  trippy stuff, live music all over the place and a ton of great stuff on offer (but all too expensive). We ended our trip with a very uncomfortable bus trip from Calangute to Panjim where there were atleast double of the bus’s capacity stuffed in.

Side note: I will never forgive Neeta busses for subjecting me to Tees Maar Khan twice – on both the to and fro Pune-Goa journey.

Leg 3 : Delhi

We then returned to Pune and took the Duronto (which I have to say is awesome in every aspect from timeliness to food to comfort) to New Delhi. After a day of lazing around in Delhi and watching a movie (7 khoon maaf) we headed out to Agra the next day. Another awesome train, the Bhopal Shatabdi, which covered the 200km distance in 2 hours flat. In Agra we saw the Taj Mahal and Agra fort – both extremely well maintained places and then headed out to Fatehpur Sikri. The lack of maintenance in Fatehpur Sikri is appaling. Arguably the worst kept World Heritage site ever. Filth and shit all over the place, the entire complex covered in shops trying to sell you crap. We then had some of the famous Agra chat –  cheela, alu tikki, golgappa and chuski (with malai in it!) and headed back to Delhi.

The next few days were spent in doing touristy things and taking in the atmosphere in Delhi. We spent some time at Delhi haat (which is an initiative to promote handicrafts from all states), then we went to Connought Place and did a very Delhi thing (apparently) which is eating shammi kababs from Wengers with the Flavoured milk (which is served in half litre glass bottles) from Keventers. Then we had kulfi at Moets (some of the best kulfi I have ever had) and chicken from a place called Chawla’s.

The next day we went to Chandni Chowk. Here we had kachori from a shop simply called Kachoriwala, followed that with Paranthas from Paranthe wali galli at a guy called Pt. Gaya Prasad Charan’s which is a shop established in 1872 and has been run by the same family for five generations. Then we had jelebi at Jelebiwala (!) – another very old shop started in 1884. Then  we went to the Red fort and the Jama Masjid.

On the last day in Delhi, we took the Hop on Hop off bus service (called HOHO) started by Delhi tourism during the Commonwealth games. In this tour we saw Raj Ghat and Veer Bhumi, the National Gallery for Modern Art (NGMA), Humayun’s tomb, the Lotus temple and Jantar Mantar. We drove past the Qutub Minar, Safdarjung Tomb, Rajpath, Rashtrapati Bhavan, Sansad Bhavan and India Gate. The only negative of the HOHO was the guide who was giving totally useless redundant commentary – for example Captain Obvious once said “On your left you will see the Income Tax office, where people come to pay tax on their income”.

Overall the Delhi trip was very enjoyable and worked out very cheap largely thanks to the Metro (which is amazing in its network and reach).

Now I am back in Pune and back to doing nothing. A review on 7 Khoon Maaf should be up on the blog soon.