Friday 29/1/09:

Friday. A day like no other. Atleast for the band.

Its been a pretty long day and "awesomely awesome" to say the least. This is college cultural festival season. Every big college across the country usually has some cultural events going on. Since the youth has been listening to so much western music lately, they even have competitions for rock bands.

We had four such competitions. In one day.

I was up since 9am (which is pretty early for a guy like me). The first competition was an English competition organised by Sakaal (the newspaper). The venue was terrible; no stage amps, no stage hands, crummy sound guy, but they let us play one extra song even after our time limit was over.

12pm. One minute into the show, we're doing By the Way by The Chili Peppers and I go nuts and accidentally hit my head on Sunai's guitar. I didn't know it was serious until people in the crowd started pointing at me. I touched my face and found half of it covered in blood. I kept singing. Maybe I freaked a few out but there's no fun otherwise. It was all about giving your blood, sweat and tears anyway. We did our original, One Sunday Morning, PSP 12" and the Frank Zappa cover, at the end of which the crowd was going crazy. I mean seriously, people stood up! And since they were having such a good, the organisers let us do another song, so we did Tibet. It was probably our best performance ever. We managed to do our entire competition set-list and ended up having a ball on stage at the same time. It was fun.

4pm. We had lunch, then proceeded back to the same venue for the Hindi competition. We screwed up and the crowd just kept staring at me throughout, not because of the bloody face (I washed that off). It was probably the weird, accented hindi. We were a little slow on stage as well. Blame the food. I just wanted a nap.

After that was over, we had to rush to Vishwarkarma Institute of Technology, on the other end of town. It takes us an hour  to get there. We reach just in time for registration. We get the early slot, the second one, since we needed to rush to our final gig soon.

7:30pm. We end up doing both originals first. I jump off stage and accidentally whip Sunai on the face with the mic cable. Payback. I almost fell on Harshal's drum kit while jumping around. We were on our fourth song, PSP 12" when they just cut us off for exceeding the time limit. Disappointed, we left for our final and grandest gig at Symbiosis Institute of Design.

9:30pm. The moment I had awaited since last year after seeing our college seniors perform here. It was an open air theatre, lots of space to move around with only a couple of steps down to where the audience stood. When you're at ground level, performing is very different. You're connected to the audience and the whole ambience changes. It was truly amazing.

We reached the place after a really long drive. I had grown increasingly impatient towards the end; just couldn't wait to get to SID and perform! And we did perform finally. We played our hearts out. Even Prachi and Joel were there with Shane, Consta, few of his friends, and some people from our college. The crowd there was pretty good too.

We did our usual set-list. Started off with One Sunday Morning, jumped around in Tibet and screwed around in the other songs. We were falling short of time though. They told us to stop after just the third song, but the audience kind of helped us out by screaming the organisers out of stopping us! So then we did PSP 12". Sigh... The kind of fun we had just playing there for 15 minutes was something else.

After that was over, we went for dinner. We went to this really cool restaurant called Mallaka Spice and as usual, we had amazing food. Anyway, this blog isn't about food, its about the awesome weekend we had! So we had food, blah blah blah, had a great time, said goodbye to everyone and left for Bombay, the same night, for our 5th gig of the weekend.



Saturday 31/1/09

4:45am. We reach B'bay, we go to Prachi's house and we don't sleep but we do stupid things like talk with each other when we're exhausted. We get 2-3 hours of sleep. We get up at 9am and rush to Matunga to perform at a Hindi competition at UICT. But, we suck. So after a six-minute sound check and one song we leave B'bay.

3pm. Back in Pune. No sleep.

6pm. I don't know about the others but at this point of time I craved sleep. I had jumped around on four different stages in the last 27 hours and I couldn't take it any more. But I couldn't. I wasn't allowed to really. So we just drive to the Sinhagad Institute of Technology. The bands here were much. much better and much, much tighter. I was nervous. I didn't know why, but I was. We got on stage and there was nothing. No one knew us. The crowd, inspite of being pretty big for an Indian rock show, was dead silent. I didn't know what to do. We checked our sound. I looked up at the bright blinding lights and we just started with our set-list.
And that's that. Watch the video, its on youtube. http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=7deKueSuPSg, http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y8LlhIHWo0

So what happened with the results you ask?

In the competition organised by Sakaal, we won in Hindi and came second in English. We won the VIT competition. And finally, we won the competition at SIT!

Great weekend huh? 

Terrorism in Bombay, yet again. This time they attacked high profile targets in the financial capital of India. The Taj Palace Hotel, the Oberoi-Trident, C.S.T station and several other places in South Bombay. It didn't end there. They took dozens of innocent people hostage and murdered over a hundred, including three top-cops. They bombed several parts of the city creating chaos everywhere. They've ruined the lives of hundreds of good citizens and made us feel vulnerable and insecure.

Why?

Ofcourse, this is but one side of terrorism.

Terrorism, I feel, comes in various shapes and sizes. What happened in Bombay and what has been happening in almost every major Indian city throughout this year is just small scale terrorism. When the Bush administration set up hidden prisons all over the United States to detain thousands of supected terrorists even without a trial, it was an example of terrorism. When the Shiv Sena bullies people into respecting them and harrases north Indians and non-Marathi people, it is terrorism. When you highjack a plane and decide to kill a thousand human beings, it is terrorism.

People need to open their eyes to all the wrong things happening all over the globe and not just in their back yard. Terrorism is not a Muslim with a long beard. It is almost never like that. Grow up and change your attitude. Terrorism happens everyday and everywhere. And we must stop it.

   

Terrorism is never about religion. Religion is always used as an excuse. Terrorists are children who just want some love and attention are instead given AK-47s and hand grenades. Only when we dissolve these imaginary lines that we call borders and embrace each other as fellow human beings, learning to love our differences instead of fearing them, will we be able to counter terrorism.

So stop wasting your time checking my blog and go give your neighbour a hug.

I read a post about Child Labour by ZSA_MD a while ago and it got me thinking about the Indian Education System... and how I hate it. I don't want to compare a child labourer working all day with a child tortured in school. Ofcourse, the one being tortured in school is slightly better off. I'm posting this to simply reaffirm the belief that our government is still not doing a good job on the education front.


Here we are in the 21st century.

I remember my schooling in the States. Although I only studied there from kindergarten to second grade, it was the most enjoyable education I've received, honestly. I cherish whatever I can still remember about my American school. It was a fun time. The lovely, decorated class rooms, the teachers who not only taught us quite well but were also fun to hang out with, field trips, the sports and a lot of other cool things just made my schooling seem wonderful. It wasn't simply math and science. I don't know why some of the other kids didn't like it, although I remember complaining to my mom about school a few times but I don't think I ever meant it. I had a very contrasting schooling and that's probably why I remember so much of it. And that's why I thought of making a little comparison.



I came to back to India and immediately, my parents enrolled me in a local school. I hated it, I mean, you would too if you just came from a rich, developed country and were re-introduced a poverty-ridden, filthy mess called India and forced to sit in a dirty class with cheaply coloured walls and broken (sometimes overcrowded) benches and were taught in what-the-hell-is-she-saying, broken English by a teacher that I would not qualify to teach my cat.

But I dealt with it.

I didn't find ONE kid in my home town of Kolhapur that was able to talk in proper English (actually I still haven't) and more surprisingly in my, so called, "English-medium" school. What surprised me even more were the depressingly dull text books. I have seldom cried as much as I have after studying about Gandhi and Shivaji Maharaj for FIVE YEARS! Our English textbooks had a lot of poetry and the short stories were wonderful. We had a lot of other interesting subjects and languages like Marathi (which, at one point of time, I actually enjoyed reading), Hindi, General Knowledge, Geography, Maths, Science and extracurriculars. But my interest in studies was soon gone all thanks to the fact that in Indian Educational Institutions, its not understanding that matters, its memorizing. I've seen students memorizing essays, poems and entire textbooks because that's what the final exams required. It was not creativity, it was not being able to read, not even the spellings mattered. I hated school. I hated education.

After fourth standard I found school to be utterly boring. I could not stand going to school. The only thing I enjoyed at the time was making home movies (with neat scripts and all ) with my friends with a camcorder. But sadly there was no Show and Tell.

I've noticed one thing over the past ten years. Every class topper I've seen is a complete robot. They're trained to memorize. That's it. Its the same case here in college. No wonder India has failed contribute anything significant to the world in recent times, except for plain number crunching IT pros who end up leaving their sad little country behind to go develop another one. When will the educated stay behind and help change the system and the people that I so passionately hate for being so hypocritical and call my fellow Indians?