Bangalore, actually.

Did me a load of good. Met a Koshy’s-ful of Lj-friends. Mandatory trips to Landmark, Premier, Blossoms. My first Thermal And A Quarter show ( Courtesy jace) followed by a 3 AM chaiwallah hunt. A Sunday meeting with long-lost friends logorrhoean and someone I refer to as MP, Ponkhi or Ribu, depending on when and where I refer to her. A long , presumably Bangalore-auto-rickshaw-lengthened drive to harish_an‘s apartment, and a crazy trainride back to Hyderabad with a TV in tow. What more could a guy ask for? Lots, actually, but this was enough for a weekend.

The Landmark haul: I did not hang around the books in Landmark. Nosirree, I was too interested in the comics-section. Trust me, the comics I found there only reinforces my belief that nothing can explain which comics get imported to India and on what basis. I mean, this is 2004, and I found issues of Omega Men ( publication date: 1982 ), specifically issue 3, the first appearance of Lobo, Camelot 3000 ( publication date: 1982 again, and I found the early issues 1, 3 and 7), a couple of Knightfall issues of Batman, and other hyper-random issues of hyper-random titles ( Infinity Inc, Angel and The Ape ) This is crazy. Comics published after 1995 seem to have stopped being imported – of course they are being reprinted now, but why stop importing them? – and you have a proliferation of titles published in the eighties. I said “this is crazy” just now, didn’t I? I will say it again. This is crazy.

And no, it was not one and a half kilos of comics, it was one point three five kilos ( I have a weighing machine at home, and I checked it first thing Monday morning. )

Premier Bookstore:

• Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain by Charles Cross.
• Complete Adventures of Feluda Volumes One and Two by Satyajit Ray.
• The Golden Bough by James Frazier.
• Sergio Leone: Something To Do With Death by Christopher Frayling.

Blossoms:
From Balham To Bollywood by Chris England.

Rainseed was the name of the festival, and when jace told me about it, and mentioned that it was being held in a place outside the city, I kind of thought it would be some rain-dancey bash with some European sounding DJ playing bump-bump-bump beats and loads of petite young things raindancing. I mean, yes, I know, it’s a very Hyderabadi thing to say, but you would do the same thing if the first thing that greets you every morning is names like DJ Vishnu and DJ Narayan “getting the crowd going” and phrases like “European Trance” being thrown around like everybody can recognise how this bump-bump thing is European and that bump-bump is Goan and that bumpity-bumpity-bump is Ibizan trance. Boggles the mind.

Ah. That was the first thought, and a long thought it wasn’t. Not when he said the magic words “Thermal and a Quarter”. Which was very interesting, considering that everybody I know of raves about this band, that my flatmate has all the cds, and that I know all the trivia associated with the band, and I had never been to any of their live concerts. There would also be something called The Sartajpur Blues Band, and a band called Stretch. Cool! I wanted to go!

The only snag in the wanting-to-go plan and the can-go thing was the lack of transport. Uddu ( bloggolb, and my resident Guardian Angel at Bangalore) has Something Resembling a Motor Vehicle on Two Wheels which is, frankly speaking, as far removed from a motor vehicle as can be. We went to MG Road on Sunday, Uddu driving the …er…contraption, and as he’s about to park it, we find that the keyhole’s vanished! The bloomin’ thing actually came apart and went inside the steering wheel portion. I think Uddu knew something like this would happen, so he flatly refused to cover 25 miles in it. There goes my chance of seeing TAAQ live, I thought sadly.

Then jace says “I have a car.” Yeehaa!

Thank you, jace, for the neat experience. The concert, all of it, all the bands, was superb. What was equally memorable was the drive to and from the venue, with myself, Uddu, beerbal, rashmiprasad and jace in the car.
Random factoids:

• beerbal sings, and does so very well.
• The Chicken biryani at Koshy’s costs 120 rupees and manages not to taste like biryani at all.
• yellosonja, bless her soul, gave me SIX cds!! Massive Attack, Tori Amos, Shpongle, Dead Can Dance. I confess I had asked for them in the first place.
• Jace has 61 GB of movies on his HDD, and also original Nine Inch Nailscds
• Thermal and A Quarter happens to be the only band I have seen so far that can play a cover of Stairway to Heaven with panache. The other bands I have seen attempting to do the same have given cats about to drown a complex. ( I am open to debate on this )
• An example of my ever-increasing self-control: Not buying any of the TAAQ cds put up on sale inspite of having the band so close at hand to autograph them. I didn’t have too much money then, you see.
• You get tea at 3:30 AM at MG Road, from a guy who sells cups at 2 rupees each from a bicycle.
• killapop has this uncanny habit of popping up on Bangalore roads at 3 AM when you are searching for a chaiwallah.
• One problem with having a Birthday guy driving a car is that you can’t give him B’day Bumps.

Our office did not have power on Monday. We thought it was a UPS problem, but it turned out that because of some construction work at the back of the building, the labourers smashed the central Power Supply. We had to work with candles and flashlights, the production team taking turns to write Java code on notepads and passing on the sheets to the QA team to check for compilation errors, if any. Some of the team-members fainted because it was very hot, and the A/C wasn’t working, but the rest , the guys who really like the sound that whiplashes make on bare sweaty bodies, we coded like hell.

No, actually I dreamt all this because I went back home in the morning and caught up with my sleep. Travelling on a train with a 21-inch TV as a bunk-mate is a pain in the you-know-what, I tell you.