'looney tunes'. tourist district. bollywood music opening

i was called in as a judge to sophias college yesterday to judge a inter college competition for their annual ‘kaleidoscope’ event. sophias is a lovely old campus with a central garden for the girls to hang around safely in with pretty in pink buildings on all sides. the competition sounded like fun. the students had to design a musical instrument in 3 hours on the ‘theme’ of mumbai- and they are supposed to play them the next day in a performance.

mukul tagged along as we were in town together after picking up photographs at mitter bedi where the ghost of the ‘tourist district’ project was revived as a long tirade about ‘beauty queens and t-shirts and bad management of street furniture’ with a highly vocal and extremely passionate gayatri.

what’s with the concept of mumbai that made all the entrants go ‘fusion between west and east’/ ‘melting pot’ / ‘tradition and modernity’- every cliché in the book was evoked and more than 50% of the entries began with the idea of a guitar and left it at that. the one that won was conceptually as shallow as the others but just very well made- with care. the other two runners up were one fairly interesting one that said that music in mumbai is the sound that a hawker makes to get attention in a local train and they had tried to make this thing with test tubes and glass sticks. if it was better made i would have given it the first prize. the other one was something called ‘dirty, noisy, smelly’ where three balloons represented each of these aspects of bombay. at least it did not use bollywood or the trains as the icon of the city.

following this we drove to zenzi at bandra for the release of a cd of remixed forgotten bollywood grooves by a dutch guy called endo. the release was very delayed as we kept waiting for people to turn up and instead sat and had exquisite duck and crab at the dimly lit, vaguely japanese restaurant. when the presentation and release finally started it was accompanied by a slid show of the typical bollywood kitsch that is so loved by the literate – i.e. the ridiculous film posters and titles of b-grade films from the 60s and 70s or the horror films of the 80s. granted, they are extremely interesting but still there is something about the way they are fetishized by a superior urban elite that makes me uncomfortable. and that too a european elite. damn them for finding my history so ‘cute’!

the highlight of the evening were the guests who were being felicitated – musicicans who played with r d burman in his heyday like the man who played the sultry sexy opening riff on the saxophone in ‘piya tu ab to aaja’. or even babla whose ‘disco dandiya’ was what i used to be so snobbish about when i was in school.

"tourist district"

sophias 'looney tunes'

'bollywood connection'