A guest post from Melody.
A: More than you can imagine!
Photographs taken at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, the annual art festival in Mumbai housing “Gallery and pavement shows, exhibitions, literary events, film screenings, music concerts, dance performances, theatre shows, workshops, heritage walks, a food fiesta, and a buzzing street festival bring in audiences and participants from all over the city” (cf Kala Ghoda Association)
Ten days ago, I stood in the line for tickets at Bandra station and noticed that the guy in front of me had these lines printed calligraphy-style on his T-shirt:
Stone Dead Forever
Auttgart Sineers
Galaxy Rainers
Bengrance — Witteilingen.
Being Outstanding in a Complex Society Revolution
I know, I know. You feel envious that you weren’t there to read these words for yourself. Believe me, I felt privileged.
But on Sunday (Feb 10) at the Kala Ghoda Festival, I noticed this on a T-shirt that passed by:
Being Outstanding in a Complex Society
Now that has to rank as a seriously improbable coincidence. In years of being a T-shirt slogan watcher, I’ve never seen the same wacky slogan twice. Here it’s happened within ten days. Naturally, I wonder if this is some popular quote, sort of like “Don’t tase me, bro”.
Is it?
Courtesy Aniruddha Kadam.
Click here for some Day 1 pictures.
Got pictures? Leave a link in the comments space, and we’ll add you here.
As someone else on this page remarked earlier, mornings at the Kala Ghoda festival are special. Reminds me of times I’ve gone flamingo-watching in Sewri on weekend mornings. There and here, there’s a slow move to wakefulness afoot, and it lends an air of lazy stretchy languor to everything.
So on Saturday morning (Feb 8).
I stumble across a man eating breakfast behind one of the stalls.
Two men sit on the stairs chatting in whispers even though they don’t need to but maybe they feel they must. When I first see them, I stop short — because from that angle, with the vast branches of a tree spreading above them, they are the only two humans in my field of view. And there hasn’t been a previous moment at the Festival when I could have made such a statement.
So much of the colour at Kala Ghoda comes from not just the artists but the visitors as well. That little street is awash with colour. Art students display their fledgling works. Aspiring writers congregate with journalists. Photographers stroll around, cameras casually hung around their necks. Families wander around wonder and curiosity writ large on their faces. Busy corporate types step out to ‘catch the fest’, ties loosened around their necks and their reactions escaping from their normally controlled faces. Tourists bustle about, wide-eyed at the colour. Teenagers mill about, their natural energy, for once, shared by everyone in the crowd alike, age irrespective.
The different faces of the city walk around marveling at the sights. And at each other.
(Click here to read the whole post)
The art district of Mumbai is hosting a festival. Movies are being screened, workshops conducted, books discussed, plays (and other acts) staged. There is also a mela happening!
Don’t believe me?
Here is a potter. He beckons…come closer. A grinning imp, paint streaked across his face settles down to touch the clay.
At the core of the KGAF, every year, is the street art. From the bizzare to the thought provoking, from the quirky to the cute…. each year the street exhibits manage to get the crowds gawking. And, this year was no exception.
At the centre piece of the KGAF exhibtion was a giant ferris wheels of cycles with dabbhas….
Mumbai Masti - from the exhibition:
If the world is your playground, then Mumbai is certainly a giant ferris wheel. And one that carries everything with it, as it goes around its axis going about its daily business.
(Click here to read the whole post)
Thanks to the innovative organizers of this play, I don’t have to think of a title for this post. ;-)
Organized by Nitin Das and the Sheikh brothers, Chana Chai Nukkad Natak featured two plays enacted wholly by kids from the Akanksha NGO (with some prodding from Nitin who sat at the back of the stage directing the kids and correcting their cute faux pases).
The first play was about a man saddled with an ailing mother, and two brothers - one mad, and the other given to drinking a lot. He wishes to get his mother to a good hospital, to get his mad brother married, and to gift his drinking brother a career. To that end, he forges fake banknotes. The man gives a fake 500 rupees note to his mother, who buys groceries (or ration as it is called out of habit in India, thanks to the Raj’s and then the government’s policy of rationing food). The shopkeeper later recognizes the fake and adulterates food in order to compensate for the loss. The adulterated ration is bought by a lady whose jobless husband eats it, and goes to an interview with a sick stomach. Rejected in the interview, he becomes a nakli doctor. Finally the drinking brother of the man who had forged the note falls ill and is killed by the fake medicine administered by the fake doctor. The play was aptly titled Nakli Duniya.
(Click here to read the whole post)
The Avant-Garde movie screenings at Gallery Beyond ended twenty minutes early in spite of the organizers thankfully repeating the first two movies by Man Ray which I’d missed on account of being late. I rushed to Eros to catch Bow Barracks Forever; expectedly I was told that the Preview Theatre was filled to capacity. I took a ride back to Kala Ghoda thinking I might have missed the Kathak performance, but might as well drink in on the later performances.
I arrived halfway through the Odissi performance by Ms. Sujata Mohapatra. It was the first classical performance I saw being held in an open-air theatre, so I had my reservations. But Mohapatra’s excellent performance soon dispelled all of them.
Wearing the white raiment and adornments of an Odissi dancer, she might as well have personified the quality of purity. Her dance was one energetic, controlled expression of sublime artistry; her countenance and hands in perfect tandem with the moods of the song being sung.
The music too was splendid, especially the mellifluous vocals (I think it was Bengali/Oriya folk though I’m not quite sure) and the mesmerizing violin and flute whose flourishes were as brilliant as the lithe movements of the dancer’s hands.
(Click here to read the whole post)
On an apparently slow Sunday afternoon at the Festival, we — meaning the wife, our nearly-four-year-old and me — were the attraction for a reasonable crowd at the amphitheatre. It went like this: they were playing rocking Bollywood tunes, but they had nobody on stage to dance to them. I don’t know if this was a planned gap in the performance schedule, or if the performers for that slot decided to stay home. Either way, the two young emcees on stage wandered about, pleading into their mikes for people from the audience to climb up and dance. “The best dancer will win a prize!” they said.
Eventually, a slender young man in a maroon T-shirt and glasses leaped up. Handed over his glasses and began srutting about, pointing periodically up at the trees and sky, once falling onto his back and pointing from there. Yet it was all in time to the music, strangely graceful, and refreshingly different from typical Bollywood dancing.
Five or six more young men — only men — flooded on, some of them clearly trained and accomplished gyrators. But the most endearing was a thirty-something man with a thick moustache and a definite belly, moving about the stage, shaking an arm, shaking a leg, with abandon. When the song was done, everyone jumped off the stage, except him. He commandeered a mike and told us all: “I’m just an ordinary engineer! I just got up here to express myself! You all should come up and express yourself too!”
(Click here to read the whole post)
Admittedly, this is not about KGAF itself. Maybe it does raise some issues though. With no further ado…
After spending most of Sunday afternoon and evening at KGAF with the kiddos, they were starting to tire, asking to go home. Wife wanted to listen to two sessions at David Sassoon Library that would run later than the kids’ bedtimes, so she stayed on while a friend and I walked with the little ones to Churchgate and caught a train home.
About 10pm, wife called. I answered, but asked her to wait a minute because I had to tuck in the kids’ mosquito nets. When I returned, she said, as near verbatim as we can remember: “Dilip, I’m at a public phone and my time is running out!” She told me she was at Churchgate station, about to catch a train for home.
When she got home an hour later, she had a story to tell.
(Click here to read the whole post)
A lot of people come to the Kala Ghoda Art Festival in the evening. A lot of people don’t know what they are missing. And it might be a good idea to not be one of that lot of people!
I was lucky. Having signed up for a morning workshop, I ended up in town bright and early and just in time to watch the festivities being set up. I spent the entire weekend in that single lane bordered by Elphinston college, Jehangir Art Gallery, Bombay Natural History society and Rhythm House.
The Tibet India Foundation has a long association with the Kala Ghoda Festival. After keeping visitors hooked last year, they came in this year with what seemed like’Tibetian Opera’.
On a nice winter’s day in Mumbai, with crowds bustling in and around the KG venue, the amphitheater was packed,
Sunday afternoon at Kala Ghoda meant that you are jostling for space with families, who had brought kids in to see the festival. This time there seemed to be more events for children than ever before. Or, maybe it is that the corporate sponsorship - The Surf Excel Chidren’s Festival - has got the events a higher visibility, simply by being plastered everywhere.
This year, kids were everywhere. From long queues to participate in something or the other, to getting their faces painted, to watching Rajasthani puppets, to sending out messages for peace and goodwill…And it really felt good to see so many children out and about at the KGAF….
(Pictures below)
First visit to an event like the KGAF, I prefer not to go attend an event. Instead, I like to simply wander through, getting a feel of place and time and people. (Well, in that third case, not literally a feel, you understand).
And so here’s a feel of what I got a feel of, Saturday opening day evening.
Somebody sold us a lemon tart. (Food wasn’t quite the first priority on my mind as I strolled through, but close enough). Usually, I like lemon tarts: the taste, the texture, the colour. This specimen wasn’t bad, but failed on all three of those counts.
I immediately ordered another.
Wife yanked me away.
2nd–10th February '08
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