Saarang 2010

Chennai isn't good for much. However, in defense of Chennai, it does have a lot going on culturally (for december and january only). In December the temple in Mylapore had six or seven music/dance/vocal performances EVERY DAY. I feel so uncultured sometimes when I can't at all appreciate dance. After that, the Park Hotel (home of the Leather Bar) sponsored the "Park Festival" in which H.R. Britton delivered his witty travelogue. After that there was an epic dance performance 6 nights in a row at 3 hours a night of dance. It apparently was an Indian style opera/dance which chronicled the mythologies of several Hindu deities. In January, of course Pongal happens. The Kalakshetra is a school for the fine arts of India. At the Kalakshetra they had a 10 day long Pongal bazaar. I went several nights to that to witness dancing and singing and handcrafts made from all parts of India. Now that the Pongal celebrations are over, saarang 2010 is on.

Saarang is the cultural festival at IIT Madras (Indian Institute of Technology). I'm kind of impressed by the kids at IIT. They've gotten their own sponsors and put on an enormous festival complete with rock band and fusion band competitions, street performances, paint ball, tons of free concerts, sand sculpting contests, a food fair, and lots more.

Yesterday, my friend and I went over there because he wanted to attend an event about Sufi music. I don't care so much about it, but it's good to get off campus on Saturday afternoon, so I went. As we were going I found out that this "event" is a lecture. A LECTURE! I was thinking back to Allen Iverson's first stint in Philadelphia when Larry Brown was coaching....

"Practice. We talkin' 'bout practice. Not a game. Practice." I understand your gripes Allen.
"Lecture. We talkin' 'bout a lecture. Not a performance. A Lecture." I couldn't hardly believe it. Some very famous sufi singer whose name I still can't remember was giving a two hour lecture/demonstration. We got there for the last 40 minutes. I was not into it at all. She did some singing and has a beautiful voice. This I can't deny. However, she is a horrible public speaker. She had made some power point presentation and read the screen with few additional comments...

What perplexed me further was that she was doing some sort of "fusion" music of sufi and rock. It was not very good. I was wondering why I hadn't enjoyed it despite the beautiful singing and then it hit me. Her backup musicians were awful. I'll explain more about that later...

So we went off for a snack and watched college kids making asses of themselves doing silly competitions. We heard some band from France was playing at 5:30. In the meantime there were rock bands made up of Indian kids playing authentic western style rock from the 90's (they are just about 10-12 years behind in rock, but that's ok I got stuck liking that era of music anyway).

The band from France got going and they were ok. They knew how to put on a good stage show. I wasn't totally digging their sound, but they weren't bad. My friend, having no experience with this type of concert despite living 6 years in france was not having it. I think he felt similarly to me listening to a lecture of saturday freakin' afternoon. At 5:30 PM the band was going and the Indian kids were jumping and throwing each other into the air, and genuinely acting like western concert goers, except that their concert was at a time when westerners are just barely recovering from last night's hangover.

We finally went to see the finalists of the music competitions for "decibels" and "tarang." Decibels was heavy metal. I did not know that Indian kids played heavy metal... It figures though, that again, this is the same style of metal I was hearing in high school. The first band was pretty good. They had a decent singer, and the others were basically shit. My friend was even less enthused about heavy metal than the french band so we went for food and came back for tarang.

Tarang is translated as "light music." I had no idea what that meant. I assumed adult comtemporary and soft rock and whatever other mildly insipid musical forms there are. I was wrong, as usual. Light music means fusion of bollywood,kollywood, and indian classical songs with a drum beat and awful synthesizers. In the end it was ok.

In response to my own ideas about gay india, I noticed something EXTREMELY awkward. Every time a woman sang (even if she wasn't good) hoards of men would howl and scream and jump up and down. By the way, the nasally head voice that indian use to sing bollywood songs drives me up a wall! I cannot stand it at all! But these guys, they love it. I think the idea of a woman is just so foreign to them, that hearing one sing in person drives them crazy in the loins. I can't be sure, but it seems a safe bet.

Again, perhaps I'm accustomed to much higher standards coming from america, but I feel awfully cynical about the quality of most performances here. When it comes to dance, I won't make judgments because I'm totally ignorant about it, but when it comes to music... Well, let's just say, only the best of the best of the best are good, the rest are simply not up to snuff to my (and apparently western) standards.

All things being held equal, I am really impressed that the kids at IIT have put together such a big time festival. I don't have to enjoy the awful singing, or lectures, but even I found a lot of fun there.