If music be the food of love..... and all that jazz
It was a whole month after the shootings and mayhem in Mumbai, and Goa too reeled from it's aftermath. Rapid Action Force vehicles from Delhi zoomed around the state, driving mostly on the wrong side of the roads and set up camp, with bazookas and machine guns, in bunkers and foxholes, on the beaches- waiting for another Dunkirkian invasion from the sea which never came. I imagine the terrorist bosses laughing around their campfires in Baluchistan and saying ," Gotcha!"
Anyways with a never-say-die attitude Goa decided to cock a snook at the securitywallahs, terrorist threats, the economic downturn and the odd drowning tourist and partaaaaaay... right into the new year. And so; with great gusto, music, booze and hemp ( the psychoactive variant) salsa'd out onto the streets and beaches.
Back at Camp Porvorim, Goa— I was in the mood to have blood spurt from my ears, so I decided to take in a rock scene at the Candolim beach.
I arrived with some other baby-boomers at “The Sunburn Festival”, which was presenting a rock show by a whole group of bands with names like the Growling Mad Scientists, Medival Punditz, Defected Record Heads, and Order of the Essence. This show went on for three whole days, but failed to move the grounded River Princess even an inch.
When we arrived the party consisted of maybe 1500 youth of Goa, many wearing shock 'n awe attire, featuring torn jeans, chains, pointy- coloured hairdos, tattooed midriffs and pierced body parts. As you can imagine, our group, the Old Rockers from the Woodstock Era of Simla Beat Contests and JS Magazine with our Beatle boots and parallels, blended smoothly into the scene, virtually unnoticed, like water buffalo on a cruise ship.
There was our very own Vachan Chinnappa who also performed; his spontaneity ensuring that a lot of the youth were instantly affected with the St. Vitus’ Dance and spilled out onto the sand.
Festival Director Nikhil Chinappa was generally calm and composed through all the din, noise and smoke; mostly from the weed being consumed backstage in copious amounts.
I would describe the general musical genre as deafening. Even the youth of Goa seemed reluctant to get too close to the speakers for fear that the sound waves would liquefy their hairdos.
We found chairs toward the back of one of the sound stages, where we met up with Dean D'mello, a young resident architect and observer of the local rock scene.
He gave us a brief but fascinating history of rock music in Goa, which I would happily pass along to you except I couldn't hear most of it.
But from what I gathered, back in the '70s Goa had an active and subversive rock movement, which was a big part of the RP 2011 GBA protests.
Since then, however, Goan music has become much less political and much more about self-expression.
"During the day," Dean said, "a surprising proportion of the bands operate massage parlours and beach shacks."
He said the hardcore rock audience in Goa is actually quite small, which is why most local bands sing in English: "They want to go international." The problem is, their English pronunciation is often not great, the result being that neither the Konkani-speaking audience nor the English-speaking audience can really understand the lyrics. (In other words, it's pretty much the same as Bappi Lahri's compositions.)
At one point, The Con-Artists were performing a song that sounded like this:
LEAD SINGER: Humma! Humma! Hummahummahumma!
GUITARISTS: Humma! Humma! Hummahummahumma!
REMO FERNANDES : Humma! Humma! Hummahummahumma!
LEAD SINGER: Humma! Humma! Hummahummahumma!
And so on. After a while I shouted to Dean, "Are they singing 'Humma'?"
"I have no idea," he shouted back.
Later on, another band was performing another song, and one of the members of our party, sportswriter/author/international media conglomerate Muthuram-a-lingam, after listening intently for a while, said, "I believe this one is called, '(Bad word that rhymes with "duck") the Terrorist.'"
So we all listened, and sure enough, on every chorus, the lead singer appeared to be shouting, with great passion and loudness, "(Bad word) the Terrorist!"
It was a catchy tune, and on the next chorus we oldies joined in, thrusting our fists into the air and shouting "(Bad word) the terrorist!" We were crazy rockin' rebels, Indian-Ishtyle.
I am thinking of getting a tattoo.
Anyway, we had a fine time at Sunburn Goa 2008. If any of the local bands have an international breakthrough and appears in a city near you, I urge you to go hear them. Or, if the city is within 25 kilometers from your house, you can just stay home and hear them from there.
Speaking of bad words: this seems as good a time as any to inform you that the new pedestrian subway stop next to the GMC is open to public. The Bambolim subway (pronounced bum-bo-lee … yeesh!) is modern and efficient. However, it also gets very crowded, and the pedestrians use the entering-and-exiting system developed for Mumbai local trains, wherein the instant the bus stops, everybody getting off and everybody getting on tries to lunge through the same space at the same time, in clear violation of the laws of physics.
Once you manage to get inside the subway, you're generally packed in the middle of a dense mass of people, and although the exits are marked, you run the risk of missing your exit and ending up in, I don't know, Karwar. But I continue to find that whenever I get lost, or have any problem whatsoever, six or seven enthusiastic young men in T-shirts materialize out of thin air (OK, out of really thick air) and offer to help by booking me into a nearby hotel room. They all seem to speak some English, and they get a kick out of it when I try to use my pathetically limited Konkani vocabulary ("hello," "thank you" and "beer").
The volunteers seem especially amused when I use the Konkani phrase for "thank you." At least I've been assuming it means "thank you." It occurs to me, based on their reaction, that maybe it means something else. I hope to heaven it does not involve a terrorist.
