Beats International

Beat box

In Jaipur last weekend there’s about two or three thousand people in a big field, watching what’s basically a folk variety show. All sorts of marvellously colourful, bonkers acts, like the woman dancing with a grinning child sat on a tray on her head, or the men dressed as women doing whirling dervishy things. There’s even a male and female hosting duo emceeing the whole night, pretending to flirt with each other like on the Eurovision Song Contest.

A splendid collaboration between local musicians and a British beatboxer gets the kids really jumping: Rajasthani folk with a kick. Since there are only about five white people in the entire audience, I become an instant source of fascination, and the kids implore me to join in their crazy bouncing. I offer a brief half-hearted uncoordinated shake of an arm, at which point some official with a multicoloured rosette and a scowl comes over and rants at me in Hindi for causing trouble.

I try my old ‘but sir it wasn’t me they started it sir’ routine, but that hasn’t really worked since infant school. Still it’s not a problem: one conspiratorial wink to the youngsters later, and they’re back on my side.


Beat up

Back in Bombay on Sunday, and there’s a strange assembly under the flyover. About 200 young kids are sat in neat rows in school uniform, listening to a gaggle of grown ups on a stage. Some noble education cause, I presume – until I spot the billboard backdrop: a political poster with the familiar face of Bal Thackeray in the corner.

Old Bal, in case you’re not au fait with Bombay politics, is the founder of Shiv Sena, the thuggish hard-right Marathi nationalists who like to beat up immigrants – not actual foreigners, that is, but people from North India who come over here, take our jobs and our women, etc etc. They’re also the guys responsible for naming virtually everything in the city after Chhatrapati Shivaji and issuing random barely-disguised threats of violence against whoever annoys them this week.

My part of town is full of lovely, friendly people, so I was always surprised to hear from those in the know that it’s a Shiv Sena stronghold. But I guess if you give them the child at seven, they’ll give you the man.


Beat poet

Lovely literature tonight with Anne Waldman, a survivor from the Beat Poets, bezzy mate of Ginsberg no less, and fellow committed Buddhist and pricker of political pomposity. She’s magnificent, hilarious, astute, poignant at times, and mad as a chameleon who just discovered the kaleidoscope.

People try to put her generation down, but since mine has all the radical energy of a two-toed sloth doing work experience for an accountancy firm, it looks like we’re going to need them for a bit longer.