I'm no learned musician but I do have some affinity to Carnatic music. I do listen to it every now and then and enjoy it enough to attend concerts on a regular basis. I'll rant about a lot of things that I've noticed about the concerts, my escapades prior to and post the concert and during it too!
I've been to two major kinds of concerts:
a. concerts organized by some corporate event management company or something that goes on the lines of 'keeping India's great traditions alive'. These events cost a lot to attend, sometimes more than what I can afford. These usually aren't centered around one central performer and in the recent past have started the absurd fusion ideas with the pretense of cultures coming together. No, a jazz clarinetist cannot team up with carnatic violinist and make some meaningful music together, impromptu. I've seen instances when one of them keeps feeling left out because he has no clue of what the other guy is doing. There is nothing cool about two very different forms coming together with the artists never jamming together. They don't even know what the other guy's sound is! Now to the people who attend these events. I've been to 3 of these and they have always been sold out. And they have been pretty big venues. I've seen people there who think BSB is still awesome or think Pritam's Punjabi rip-offs are the greatest music after Green Day. Is it feigning the social acceptance or is it the so-called 'high society' where people eat one piece of chicken kabab topped with 4 onion shoots in a perpendicular fashion? The amount of arrogance in this crowd is absolutely astounding. This arrogance, sometimes, permeates into racism/regionalism. It is music; people should come there to listen to it, not to socialize and act prude.
b. concerts organized by some cultural association. These, in my opinion, are the real Carnatic concerts. This form of music is mostly improvisational. So, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that they have to be long enough for the essence of the form to seep into the audience. (Yup! That is a real thing!) That is usually about 2.5-3 hours. Unfortunately, these are really sparse populated. They charge nothing to very little for the entry and I think they can barely recover the operating costs. Hence there is no superfluous advertising in the local editions of the news papers. These are the ones that I truly enjoy going to.
I used to tell a few people about the concerts I intend to attend with a hope that I can, in my small way, support the art-form I believe in. And sometimes I do enjoy their company. Sometimes it has turned out to be a fucking mistake. Well, this is the part which pisses me off. Why the hell do people think people can change my bloody plans to go to an event that I told them about? No, they've never driven in this city before. No, they haven't taken the sodded public transport at that time of the day. Ergo they have no clue how long it takes to get there. No, if they have not heard this before, these people don't have anything so damn important thing that will prop up 5 minutes before the scheduled start. No, I don't care about the paranoid girlfriend/boyfriend who misses them then. I can share their concerns but not paranoia. Goddamn, how the hell do these people manage to piss me off 2 minutes before something important? That is not a rhetorical question, albeit a real one for which I'm expecting a real answer to.
Now to the rant about the conditions in the auditorium. It is a very serene setting; all pervading calmness with some genius spinning out his web of music around. And then there is one damned snotty, constipated devil's incarnate kid who starts crying, causing the much needed distraction for the hundred other people in the gathering. A one year old baby who has to be fed god-knows-how-many-times a day, shouldn't be tagged along to the concert. Oh! People with kids have the right to enjoy the music too?! Too bad, I want to slap them right across the face. But I'm not going to. So why can't a consensus be reached that people don't bring their kids and I DON'T FUCKING LOSE IT. Then there are people whose phones don't have the much needed functionality of the silent mode. Garnishing that, is the awesome cringe-causing ringtone that everyone at the gathering noticed before it even started ringing. But the caller has to be ascertained before pressing the silent button. Nope, the call has to be attended to right then, right there to definitely discuss the dinner plans or the rate of steel in the market. Because, they must be so volatile compared to the music going here, right? And then there are the spontaneous music critics who decide that the best time to critique the concert and the music is while it is going on. Our comments on the music are not as insightful as the music itself. I'm not going to talk about the kinds of rasikas, as they are called, but going to post a video with the great BMK explaining the various kinds with a very funny undertone.
Please, there are some of us who value certain things. I'm not judging your priorities and expect you to not judge mine. Some of us don't have the awesome lives that others have. In some cases it is even a massive suck-fest and the only respite is events like these. Don't spoil it for the rest of us there. And sometimes some nice things happen too!
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