Dharavi Set To Music

My office is 15 mins away from my house on early Saturday mornings. At any other time-day combination, it is atleast 40-45mins away. Between my office and my home lies Asia's largest slum. And considering it takes so long to get back in a cab, the internally stingy and externally obese person that I am, I have made it a regime to walk home everyday from work. It takes me the same amount of time, I get some exercise and above all, I get to listen to some awesome music (Yes, I am that weird guy you see dancing while crossing the traffic signal)
This theory that our senses get heightened when we close down a few others has always fascinated me. Till the time I can walk blind-folded through the tricky streets of Dharavi so that I can take in more of the sounds, I will have to make do with shutting out Dharavi's voice with music and take in the sights.
Getting right down to business, Pink Floyd and Indian Ocean have both fascinated me over the years and I listen to them an awful lot lately. And because I believe you can never have enough of a good thing, I tend to be loyal to either for the entire length of my walk.

In the order of seniority, I will go with Indian Ocean first - the water body, silly!
So Indian Ocean's link to the place is so much clearer - its music is Indian, contemporary and talks about the broader national issues which Dharavi represents in a microcosm. As the music starts working its magic, pay attention to the faces - the daily dejection, the glimpses of guilt, the hopelessness, the betrayed Bombay dream writ large on their faces. Pay attention to the speed at which people walk by, the bikes and cars honk from all directions and people still keep walking like manic zombies, unaware of their immediate surroundings - too taken by their larger troubles. Notice the loud political posters above run down houses - if you can call them houses in the first place. How the posters proclaim promises, glorify hoodlums and religious thugs; and then look at the people walking by - their heads down - sometimes in reverence to them but mostly oblivious to them. Then let Raghuram and his team take over with the guitar and the drums and tablas. Then just look at the environment - the urban waste, ramshackle shops; the naked kids, the malnourished kids, the deformed kids, the defecating kids. A lot of Indian Ocean's music asks the listener to question his current state, what he is looking for, his condition of absolute decay. At the same time, the music is sometimes reverential to a higher being - asking for his help. In that sense, Indian Ocean's music still believes that a place like Dharavi can rise above this, it wants the guy from Bihar to question whether this depravity is worth it all.
I have walked through this slum during the 26th July 2005 deluge. And the memory still visits me sometimes. The open gutters, the chest high waters, the thought that my mouth has never been this close to human waste before. Hehe, surely, "Kudrat hans padegi"



And then there is the psychedelia of Pink Floyd. Its music says more with guitar riffs than with words. It's lyrics have historically oscillated between politically charged and positively absurd. Pink Floyd's music is simultaneously both: more pessimistic and more colorful, than Indian Ocean  - assuming ofcourse that pessimism and color are ironic bedfellows in the first place.
Set to Pink Floyd, Dharavi transforms into this brightly lit cemetery. Pink Floyd's music glorifies the past and casts an even darker shadow on the present. You look at people's faces and see the early aging, the years that should never show on a 15 year old girl's face but they do because drain water is not the best moisturiser. Here there is no hope, there is just pain, dejection and an abhorrance for one's current self. The anger, the frustration is simmering on the surface as BMWs speed by to fancy multi-level parking lots at the other side of the city, in its wake leaving the people scurrying for space to walk to their dreary homes. So I sometimes imagine Gilmour, Waters, Mason and Wright giving a live performance right there in Dharavi - with the entire set-up done on the road divider - if the ruins of Pompeii stand for a great civilisation now destroyed by nature, Dharavi stands for a great civilisation being destroyed by man.
And the release is in forgetting about it, its in losing oneself in the bright colors of shanty walls, the fanciful lighting of leather goods stores, the stone and stick kiddie games next to the dump - the way the lyrics get lost in the grand guitar solos in Pink Floyd's music.

 

And yet, sometimes I walk without my music. Those days when Dharavi is set to its own choice of music. Bollywood chartbusters blended with Hindu bhajans during Ganpati and Bollywood chartbusters blended with Sufi Qawwalis during Id. On those days, I see these people the way they see me everyday - it is their own version of 'Dharavi Set To Music' and they trip on it big time!

A Nation of Toothless, Humorless, Selfish Bigots

One lesson which some of my best teachers have managed to teach me is that patriotism is not so much about being proud of your nation as it is about identifying what makes it difficult for you to be proud of it and going about rectifying it.

I attended 2 awesome weddings in the last month or so. 2 weddings which were as unlike each other as chalk and cheese. One was in a quaint little town in MP and the other was in badass Bombay. One baraat was attended by the entire town, albeit from their rooftops and the other was attended by a few who managed to make it on time in the rush hour evening traffic. One was so noisy that many city-slicker friends of mine refused to walk too close to the band and instead stopped over for a sutta on the way and the other had to quieten down every time it went past a major govt office building in South Bombay. One had awesome food made by humble women and served fresh by their men and the other had the most awesome spread of vegetarian food made by the best caterer in town. One was a love marriage between long time college sweethearts and the other was an arranged marriage between two Gujju diamond trader families. The one thing common between the two was the greed on the band master's face as he went hard at his drum with every passing beat. With every 20 buck note wagged in front of his nose, he went on and on with all the strength his malnourished arms could muster. He would thrust his right breast pocket in front of you just so you would put a couple of those notes in his pocket. What is a few 20 buck notes for the diamond trader's son who carries millions worth of diamonds in his pockets and travels from Mumbai to Surat to save some duty? If you find money being thrown at women to make them dance vulgar, I dont know how just because the gender has changed it becomes any less vulgar.

Which brings me to the essential point. In our mad pursuit of that prophecy of becoming the next superpower, are we even conscious how many values, ideals and most importantly, people are just falling by the wayside?

We are waging so many battles on censorship which are basically battles on how we want to be perceived. So there is a Kapil Sibal-social media row, a Salman Rushdie-Jaipur Litfest row, a Top-Gear India row, a Hussain painting row which did not let him die on his homeland; and millions others that the likes of Shiv Sena fight on a daily basis. We as a nation have no sense of humour, no willingness to see another view. If a democracy has no space for multiple opinions then what differentiates us from China? And if nothing differentiates us from China then remember that our Tiananmen Square has still not happened. That civil unrest has never really consolidated into a proper threat yet. And that is something we are setting ourselves up for with this sort of climate. 

I can imagine a show as harmless as Boston Legal can never be Indianised as it will raise in our middle class living rooms on a daily basis the caste issue, the sexuality issue, the Hindu-Muslim issue - now we dont want the "upwardly mobile, aspirational, nuvo riche" middle class questioning these things, do we? What sort of pathetic nation wouldnt even let a director/writer/painter put across his opinion without fearing for his life?

And we arent even done with building a nation yet and we are spending so much time building a perception? Lets first build a nation that works and then go about window-dressing it so that we look nice to ourselves and others. 

So i am sure you have heard of how peasants in Maharashtra commit suicides unusually often. So on an unsually cold winter evening in Bombay, there we were chomping down with vigour on our Pav Bhaji on the most awesome Pav Bhaji place i know. The kind that i missed so much in Delhi that i spent an obscure amount at Kingdom of Dreams to just experience a semblance of that taste. But I digress! Being a rather slow evening as Bombay doesnt know what to do with so much cold just as Delhi doesnt know what to do with so many puddles, we got to talking with the stall-owner and he told us how the vegetable prices in the markets crash every year during this time. How the farmers always have a bumper crop this time of the year and there really isnt a good price they get as the supply far exceeds the demand with China stuff flooding the market. So imagine this family of farmers sitting in Vidarbha somewhere staring at a pile of ripe tomatoes in their field. (I could imagine in a Kissan ad, the farmers should suddenly start celebrating Tomatina fest with that pile, right?) Imagine them staring at them during the day and during the cold winter nights. "Winters in rural Vidarbha can be particularly cruel," the MTDC brochure says. "Temperatures can go down to even 5 degrees in the nights." Imagine the farmer's son peering at the pile of tomatoes thinking surely those should be worth something. Surely they could get him rotis and rice and onions and potatoes. He doesnt even know people who eat chicken are also people like him.  Instead he is shivering on this sleepless night as tonight its his sister's turn to use the single rag of a blanket the family owns. Now imagine the farmer looking at his son's quizzical eyes. Wouldnt it be easier to die than to give him false hope? Wouldnt we all do the easier thing if we had the choice? How many ever social media companies Kapil Sibal sues, he still wont change that kid's perception of the pile of tomatoes.

And then we say we should kill those bloody Maoists. Hehe, we are funny!