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Continuing the Kaavish fanboyism, I was told by brok3n that their OST for a play Dastoor is freely available at their official website. Find the tracks here. My favourite is Teray Dum Se Hi (mp3 link). The flute piece almost makes me want to start playing music regularly again.
Besides Coke Studio and the occasional song, I haven’t heard any good music from the sub-continent in a long time. If you know of any recent good music, please share, or write to the blog e-mail id. Genre no bar — Hindustani/Carnatic/Bollywood/Indi-rock/ anything is fine by me.
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I attended Zakir Hussain’s Masters of Percussion at San Francisco last week. It is a series of concerts around the U.S. with Zakir Hussain (tabla), Taufiq Qureshi (percussions), Sridhar Parthasarthy (mridangam), Ganesh-Kumaresh (violin), Naveen Sharma (dholak) and the trio – Motilal Dhakis of Bengal who play the traditional processional drums.
The concert was underwhelming — but only because I had heard better, from the same artistes. A friend, whose second ever concert happened to be this, enjoyed it.
Zakir Hussain has a knack of playing to the level of the audience. He usually tests the waters in the first few minutes and settles down at the point where audience applause follows. If he played the exact thing at Sawai Gandharva, I am unsure if he would’ve gathered any applause at all. Here, he was the crowd favourite. I don’t blame the audience either. I am guessing this was the introduction to Indian classical music for many.
It was also ironic that for a concert Masters of Percussion, hardly anyone in the audience was counting beats. Taufiq Qureshi and Zakir Hussain had a lengthy jugalbandi, where they played a piece in a 15-beat rhythm. That was immense fun. There was also a 8-10 minute period where I couldn’t figure out what was going on. It was way above my level of understanding, I think.
Beyond these, there were the usual train sounds. I absolutely hate it when Zakir or Taufiq simulate the deer-running and train sounds. It is a compulsory feature when the audience is suave. In Pune, I stayed away from Zakir concerts at the Boat Clubs. The audience at SF were a perfect fit, so the tricks followed. Everyone loved it; I didn’t.
Ganesh and Kumaresh were disappointing. They are the only classical violinists I enjoy, because their music often crosses the limits of Carnatic music seamlessly. Being on the only non-percussion instrument, I expected them to play something special. That didn’t happen.
If you haven’t heard either of these artistes perform live, you might like Masters of Percussion. If you have, I’d recommend giving it a miss.
And since I attended it, it is time to redeem myself by watching this video of Shakti :
The Indian government recently banned FTV (that’s Fashion TV, for those so engrossed in it that they don’t know what the acronym stands for). The press statement, though, makes it worthy of a place at this blog :
The government has banned fashion TV channel FTV for 10 days from March 12, accusing it of broadcasting images of “semi-nude women”.
According to a statement, a programme on FTV channel telecast on September 4, 2009, showed “women with nude upper body which was offending against good taste and decency.”
I understand a ban; I don’t understand a 10-day ban though. So what, they expect FTV will think about its mistakes and feel sorry ?
Did you notice, someone is shy to use the word topless. Mmkay …
On a different note, I can totally imagine an Information and Broadcasting Ministry official getting married, and just about to consummate his relationship with his newly-wed wife. His wife offers him a glass of milk, as they do in the movies. She then turns down the lights and shyly, proceeds to undress herself.
He, meanwhile, finishes the milk, feels all ready and set to go, and looks at his wife.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but you are a woman with a nude upper body ! I hereby ban you for 10 days from my house.”
Today, in a moment of epiphany, I realized this :
Raj Thackeray would make a terrible batsman.
Why, you ask ?
Because he would go after anything outside the off stump.
P.S. : Too much politics and cricket leads to such ideas.
It is Oscar season and I saw 2 nominated movies recently that were based on true stories. The first, Invictus, was the better of the two and a satisfying watch. Morgan Freeman’s Oscar nomination is something I don’t quite get, but I didn’t find much to complain about in the movie.
The second, The Blind Side, was an interesting movie — in the sense, the story was amazing. I would recommend giving the movie a skip and instead, reading this 2006 feature at the The New York Times. That is the story of Michael Oher, the central character of The Blind Side. I didn’t read this before watching the movie, so the movie seemed interesting. Post reading, it became very obvious that the movie was being used as Sandra Bullock’s Oscar vehicle. There were many scenes that seemed not-essential to the plot, but I am sure those very scenes contributed to her Oscar nomination — which again I do not get.
I haven’t seen Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart, but most other acting nominations were disappointing this year. George Clooney for Up In The Air was incomprehensible. Among the 10 movies that were nominated for the Best Movie, I have seen a handful. In my very humble opinion, the only deserving nominations were The Hurt Locker and Up.
Anyway, the Oscars are over and there isn’t much point debating the nominations.
Have you heard of Rajeev Reddy ? Does the name Country Club Chairman ring a bell ?
Rajeev Reddy makes us realize how lucky we are to have an opposable thumb. Every image of his has a recurring theme : a proud display of his opposable thumb. Some examples here :
I also hear it is contagious, as evidenced by this nice female who is infected :
He stays true to principle in family photographs too :
Far more fitting tributes to Mr. Reddy have been written previously by Anand Ramachandran and Rohan D’Sa. All I wish to add to it, is this video I came across recently. If this doesn’t make you realize how lucky you are to be born a human, nothing will.
Images via : The Hindu, Son of Bosey, Microsoft Kid.
ONE serious post is all that Nithyananda gets. Nithyananda is back in the news, defending himself. I’ll let my tweets do the talking :
#Nithyananda: I will avoid ‘experiments’ unacceptable to society http://bit.ly/aRH3dk By that, he means videotaping his sex.
#Nithyananda : I was in trance when video was recorded http://bit.ly/dhRkAa Does that make him trance-sexual ?
The first charge filed against #Nithyananda. It is for ‘bringing disrepute to saffron robes’ http://bit.ly/bjT3go
Besides these, he claims that the video was morphed and manipulated, clearly proving that spirituality might teach you plenty, but basic knowledge of computers is not one of them.
He resurfaced at Haridwar, and said in an interview that he’d soon begin a maun-vrath. In effect, he will shut his mouth …. for talking that is.
He also sat down for a couple of interviews with a certain Rajiv Malhotra, who I presume is a devotee. The videos are here and here. The nearly 30 mins. interview, in which Rajiv warns Nithyananda that the question will by “completely direct”, completely avoids the sex tape. How convenient.
I especially loved the second video, in which both seem to agree that the ashram and its followers couldn’t handle the negative PR and attacks on Nithyananda. What follows is immensely WTF : They agree that being Brahmins, they weren’t trained to cope with veiled attacks and don’t have the instincts to fight. They further wished that they would’ve given some Kshatriya training to their disciples.
Sound logic. Except for the teeny-weeny fact that Brahmins — or to be generic, the priest class of every religion — (Edit) are arguably have arguably been the most sly.
I saw the 55th Filmfare awards recently. That is one of the reasons I go skiing : if I don’t, I watch such things.
The usual duo — Shahrukh Khan and Saif Ali Khan — hosted it. The show was horrible. It came across as unrehearsed and unpolished. I think that is one of the main reasons why no one takes all the private award show functions seriously. None of them — Screen, Stardust, IIFA, Filmfare (I think I missed a couple) — take themselves seriously, then how do they expect viewers to ?
The Academy Awards, Golden Globes, SAG and all other awards are probably no different then the Indian awards : most of them have a formula and they can be cracked. This can be generalized to any popular award function, because hypothetically speaking, if we had an award that only honoured the absolute best, I don’t think anyone would care about it.
While arguably similar in nature, the respect that the Globes and Oscars get is nowhere close to the Filmfares. The reason (I think) is what I said before — they don’t take themselves seriously. Since last year, there has also been a trend to introduce drama and reality TV into these functions. It started with Sajid Khan and Ashutosh Gowariker last year, and this year, it was a “fight” between SRK and Neil Nitin Mukesh.
I don’t mind good fights on television (the Sajid Khan one is a fine example), but the SRK-NNK one is embarrassing to watch. It was staged, but it wasn’t polished enough to come across as authentic, and it wasn’t crass enough to be obviously in humour. It was just bad.
Oh and for some WTF reason, Filmfare had a lengthy tribute to Michael Jackson. Shahid Kapur (I am guessing he was the youngest boy in Bollywood) performed some MJ numbers, while the crowd looked on cluelessly. Now I haven’t seen a lot of MJ, but Shahid Kapur just came across as wanting to prove some random point to Kareena Kapoor. With his ever bulging biceps, he is going down the path of Sunny Deol rather than Michael Jackson. Only an elastic body or some young boys can save him now.
Incidentally, Shahid Kapur’s biceps are still smaller than Vidya Balan’s.
Update : A friend reminds me that the Bachchans did not attend the Filmfares. It had to do with the Mumbai Mirror incident, although I don’t know what the exact connection is. All I can say is I missed the Bachchans thing that they do at award shows.
It is no secret that I am not a great fan of Aamir. I don’t dismiss him entirely — in fact, I really like the pre-perfectionist Aamir a lot — but a lot of his image now is carefully crafted publicity. Anyone who thinks otherwise is welcome to take this offline with me.
Among the things that does annoy me is the double standards he holds, by choosing to not attend Indian film award functions, but bending over backwards when it comes to the Oscars. And that is just the tip of my peeves.
Anyway, when I saw this news When James Cameron met Aamir Khan, I couldn’t resist a chuckle.
I am sure both are great artistes at what they do best (this too could be taken offline), but there is such an obvious discord here between the known craft of one and the perceived craft of the second.
No ?
I came across this hilarious blog titled Wrong Advice, a tribute to the Dr. Watsas of the world and the ones writing in with profound questions. Some posts I liked are here and here. The link are Not Safe For Work, but you should have guessed that already.
It seems to be published by someone using obvious fake names. But I can bet the guy/girl must be a fan of Dr. Watsa, just like yours truly.
P.S. : No, I am not the author. I don’t write as well.
