Posts Tagged With: Music
Kidjo Yourself
Now I know you can’t get the feel of a concert on videos and I’m no connoisseur of Angelique Kidjo’s YouTube clips, but the few snippets I’ve seen didn’t prepare me for her concert last night at NCPA. The videos that I have seen of Kidjo all show her with a bevy of back-up singers [...]
Something Old, Something New
Like most sensible heterosexual females who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, I had a massive crush on the tabla player Ustad Zakir Hussain. I met Hussain once. He held my hand, asked me my name and smiled when I told him. I remember how enormous his hands looked, the fingers rounded at the [...]
Concerted efforts
Yesterday evening, I went to see the London Symphony Orchestra because someone I knew had 2 free tickets. It was pretty darn fantastic, I felt, although it is true that I can’t tell Edward Elgar from Frederic Chopin unless I have a program to make me sound clever and knowledgeable. I might be illiterate when [...]
Tip Tape
Here are what went streaking through my head while watching Vampire Weekend’s video for the song “Cousins”: 1. Are Vampire Weekend channelling their inner Bappi Lahiri with that “Eh-eh-ooh-aah!” bit in the beginning of the song? (The link is just an example, by the way. Those who have know Mr. Lahiri’s discography will know that [...]
Rock it. Ya.
Here’s the good news about the Indian elections: it looks like about 65% of this country is going to come out and vote. That’s about 650 million people. That’s more than the combined populations of the three countries I visited last month (I think). Here’s the bad news: Varun Gandhi, Mallika Sarabhai, Meera Sanyal and [...]
Loony Tunes
You have to feel sorry for Martin Luther King III. First, his name is Martin Luther King. Second, of all the things he could grow up to be, he decided to become a human rights advocate. Third, when he’s in Mumbai and talking about how his father Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was inspired by [...]
Little Joy
The word on the street is that India is witnessing a “financial meltdown” (tell that to the 1,200 people rumoured to have lost their jobs at the Times of India) but one look at Mumbai’s art district this past month, and you can tell recession is here. The openings are dismal with the galleries serving [...]
Name Dropping
Someone I know had a son a few years ago. He named the kid Rolls. Last year, he and his wife had another boy. They named him Royce. It’s tough on poor Rolls, especially if he ends up being a tubby kid, because independent of his brother he’s a random verb in present tense. The [...]
Base note
When a friend of mine was a sweet-faced 19 year-old, he and his college mates formed a band. Individuals seemed to become band members if they owned instruments (have drum kit but no sense of rhythm? be drummer and practice.) or if they could organise rehearsal space. This rehearsal space business was pretty curious because [...]
Hot and Coldplay
Sometimes, I love New York Magazine. The Vulture on a review of Coldplay’s new album Viva La Vida, or Death and All His Friends – According to The Sun‘s Gordon Smart, the world’s first critic to review Coldplay’s upcoming Viva La Vida, or Death and All His Friends, the record is “the biggest album of [...]
World Domination
