Sitting in Barcelona last week, continents apart, I tried to visualise life on the other side of the planet. I was just 11 years old the last time I was there. To see India through adult eyes for the very first time will be strange. I remember the smells, the colours and the swarm of people begging around us for food and money. I remember shantytowns and slums that we bypassed on the way to villages where friends and relatives lived. I also remember meeting people my own age at the time. In particular, a Rajasthani girl about 10 years old, who was about to marry a 40 year old man. She’d learnt the only English words she knew from a Bollywood movie song. It was from the Bappi Lahiri movie, Disco Dancer, and went something like, “I am a disco dancer…. Zindagi mera divanaaaa!” - It was hilarious, but you gotta watch the spoof video (www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYdYJSZvaSY) to get a fuller understanding! I think of that girl now and of how different our lives must be. It makes me wonder how she ever coped with being catapulted straight from childhood into womanhood.
Lovely Londoners
My sister decided to pick me up from Heathrow instead of Gatwick. The wheels of my exploding bag had already broken by the time I’d left Barcelona. Twice my size and about 10 times my weight, I dragged the thing through the underground and felt tears of frustration as I tried to get from train station to underground. A few people eventually come to the rescue. One guy even picked the whole thing up and ran up a load of stares for me. I take back all those misconceptions about cold, robotic, London commuters that stare right through you with their soulless eyes. Behind the blank stare is a person with a heart and soul willing to get off their arse to help someone else in trouble. It made me realise there are kind and helpful people everywhere. Even in London.
It’s all happenin’ in Camden
Camden cool! It’s been about five years since I’ve been back. The fire has destroyed its soul in many ways, although it does still have that groovy London feel. We went to the InSpiral Lounge. A funky little set-up conjured up by Dom, the brainchild behind the Synergy Project. It’s an organic café featuring live music and DJ sets, and serves amazing food and drinks. There’s even organic beer and the spirit of the place is kept alive by the energy of all sorts of weird and wonderful London folks. Saw Coldcut at the BBC Electric Proms. Felt strange to see them perform within such a formal set-up in comparison to the times I’ve seen them bring the house down at all the hedonistic festivals I’ve been to. Connected with Matt after the show. He reminds me of a wizard. They’re still doing some pretty amazing things and you can feel the conviction behind their productions. The essence of the message could not be clearer and clarity is what we need in this world. Too many people are mind-numbingly ignorant about so many things. Twenty odd years on, and they continue to create original material with an energy that is significant for the elevation of collective consciousness and global awareness at intellectual and artistic levels. It’s a combustion of creativity and technical skill. Guess someone had to do it. Watched the Coldcut v TV Sheriff Revolution video after the show. Check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6Lz264wOAg
British telly
There’s Coldcut and then there’s your bog-standard, run of the mill, mind-numbing British telly. We can all choose what we want to watch, but knowing what to watch is half the battle. Having lived in Spain for the last six years, I conveniently forgot about the magnitude of shit that flies from the British television. It reminds me of an octopus with tentacles killing the chakras of the body. You feel suffocated by its agenda for advertising, brainwashed by politically controlled news media, intellectually crippled by cheap game shows and cheated by products of manufactured pop where motivation for scumbags like Simon Cowell lies with money not music. As we experience the credit crunch and as businesses go bankrupt across the world, narcissistic twats like Russell Brand are earning six figure salaries, reality TV shows entice couples to cheat on each other and housefuls of people are egged on to single out and victimize individuals. Is this the reality of our society? The characteristics of the nation are regressing. Fear, paranoia, division and hatred too are becoming its fundamental components. It all comes down to the controlled media that is validating and condoning the fact it’s okay to be this way. Intellectual prostitutes have made television an opiate of the majority who continue to believe all they see and all they hear. And as they say, tell a lie enough times and people believe it as truth. The rest, as they say, is history.
Indian on the telly!
Virgin have recently taken to advertising Bollywood movie songs! Yes, there is a huge Indian population residing in Great Britain. Yes, many of them are besotted by Bollywood culture. But, NO, they do NOT need mass media advertising to convince them to listen to their own fucking music! Yet people will watch this and say, “Babaji, Indian on telly, look, look! Indian!” and this is enough of an impact to generate record sales. It’s times like these I feel happy to be leaving the European terrain, especially when I know there’s a lot more to the world than the politically biased propaganda and consumer-driven media to which we are subjected. Yes, India is on the same path and while it’ll be interesting to see the impact of its propaganda machine, it’s a place still a big enough to discover a million sparkling gems.
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