Fireflies in the night

Fireflies Music Festival, Fireflies Ashram, Off Kanakpura Road
6:00pm, Saturday, Feb 22, 2008, through to 7:00am Sunday morning, Feb 23, 2008.
An all-nighter music concert featuring assorted Indian and foreign musicians. Nowhere near the scale of awesomeness that Vasantahabba used to be, but it's something. I tagged along with my Shro and friends and we spent quite a fun night at the open-air jamboree. Musicians performed on a stage under a big, beautiful banyan tree.
We had Kabir's poems in Hindustani folk, we had Oikyotaan, a folksy-Sufi-somesuch band from Bangladesh (thumbs up to Karthick Das Baul), we had mediocre but extremely entertaining qawwals and there was a Mr Glenn Rogers on classical guitar. Special mention for the qawwal troupe. They really got the crowd going. (Although I was laughing in amusement having grown up on the genius of Nusrat Khan saheb, the Sabris, Abida Parveen and the like.) This troupe was something else, but I liked the main man. He had charisma. He hit the high notes alright but really lost it down low. So cute.


Nice nippy night, excellent bisi belle bath and bhajjis as full meals, and barring the many rascal, rowdy type elements that always mar such occasions, 'twas a pleasant night sure. (These abberrents got pissed drunk as soon as they sat their bottoms down, laughed and talked loudly in the middle of perfomances, did the cringe-inducing pelvic-thrust kind of dances while religios songs and qawwalis were being performed and screamed out things like, "Eyyy, refugees!" when the Bangla band came on. These are just a few for instances.)
I enjoyed like anything. It had been a while since I had been to one of these cultural dos. Maybe not top-notch, but definitely a good thing.
And now back to Vasantahabba....
Why, oh why,
Did Protima die?
And leave the suits to say "NO MORE."