On a raga tip

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If there’s a better place to watch a gig than the Bandra Amphitheatre then I’d love to see it.

I’m sat on a ruined stone fort looking out towards the Arabian Sea. Between me and the ocean lies a crescent of huge palm trees, and the moon just about finds a gap to poke through and say hello. Occasionally I catch the reassuring sssshhhhhwwwww of a wave rolling up and over the rocks. But mostly that’s drowned out by about eight hundred young hipsters on the raked grassy banks below me, watching half a dozen brilliant musicians from Bangalore on the raised ground in front of the trees.

Swarathma, the band’s called: they’ve taken Indian traditional music and given it a riotous kick up the khyber, spiced with some Kannada politics and a front-man with the best fro-and-goatee combo since Samuel L Jackson in Pulp Fiction. It’s as if Bellowhead and the Saw Doctors swallowed the Bhagavad Gita one night and went off on a raga tip.


There’s no place like, er, eek

Scary moment back in London last week. Making small talk with someone, chatting about my diary for the trip: “…couple more meetings on Monday and then I fly home”.

She stops me. Home? By which I mean back to Bombay? After less than two months? I wasn’t even thinking about it. But, well, uh-oh. Scary.