The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption

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I haven’t watched TV or read newspapers or magazines for more than a year now, with one exception — twice a month, I stop by at the roadside magazine stall opposite my house and hand over thirty rupees for a copy of Time Out Mumbai.

However, even though I have been buying the magazine for almost two years now, I only started to think of it as a necessity when I started my experiment.

The thing is, when you decide not to consume any paid entertainment, you need to know what free entertainment is available in the city, and, even in the age of free information via the Internet, Time Out Mumbai remains the most comprehensive listing of such events.

So, every fortnight, I pick up my copy of Time Out Mumbai, read the reviews of all the new movies and plays I wouldn’t watch, look longingly at all the live music gigs I’ll miss, and tell myself that the few free events during the fortnight are more interesting than all the entertainment I would have otherwise paid for.

Sometimes, that is not far from the truth.

This fortnight, for instance, I’m almost spoiled for choice.

The Saturday Night Movie Marathon turned out to be exactly what I needed after working all day on another big presentation.

To begin with, fewer people turned up — and, while twenty is perhaps the right number for a party — five works better for a movie marathon.

Then, GK turned up with a few DVDs of his own and we decided to leave aside my lineup of classic World War 2 movies and watch ‘Into the Wild’ instead.

I have been dying to watch ‘Into the Wild’ ever since I read about it in the April 2008 issue of David Report. So, as we settled down on my futon with two bottles of wine, a bottle of Johny Walker Black Label scotch, and miscellaneous munchies left over from my last big party, I was already high on the sweet serendipity of being able to watch it so soon after reading about it.

It’s a mind-blowing movie, especially in the context of my experiment, but the spectrum of emotions it triggered off in the next two and a half hours deserves another post.

Undeterred by my earlier escapade with ‘The French Touch’ festival, I returned to the Alliance Francaise auditorium on Thursday evening to watch Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 film ‘Le Petit Soldat’ (’The Little Soldier’).

Set against the backdrop of the Algerian War, the film narrates the tragic love story of Michel Subord and Anna Karina who fall in love in spite of belonging to warring terrorist groups. The film pulsates with the same restless energy as ‘Breathless’, my favorite Godard movie, which was screened at the festival earlier on Tuesday. So, in spite of the little anti-climax at the end, when the DVD stuck and wouldn’t play, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, or at least the part of the movie I did watch.

After the movie I ran into G.K. Desai, a Bollywood actor and producer, who has worked in several of Madhur Bhandarkar’s movies.

GK and I first met each other at a 24 hour film festival a few months ago when we watched six movies back to back on a weekend. We again spent half a day together at the Tri Continental Film Festival in January. In fact, at every film festival I now attend, I almost except to see him in his really cute attire of denim shorts, ‘I love California’ t-shirts and baseball cap.

During my year of being off-consumption, I’m not allowed to watch movies, plays, or concerts, unless they are free.

However, I’m discovering that Mumbai has a wide variety of free entertainment to offer; all you need is the inclination, and a copy of Time Out Mumbai.

But it was not Time Out, but a flier someone thrust into my hand as I walked out of the Alliance Francaise auditorium after watching Godard’s ‘Little Soldier’ that led me to the Little Theater at NCPA on Friday evening to watch Surabhi Sharma’s documentary film ‘Jahaji Music: India in the Caribbean’.

I saw three stories unfold in front of my eyes during the evening.

The first story was the film itself, a musical road trip in which FTII alumnus Surabhi and academic Tejaswini Niranjana follow maverick Indian singer Remo Fernandes as he travels to the Caribbean to explore potential collaborations and create new work. This is the story of young women at an Indian wedding in Trinidad thrusting their pelvis to Bhojpuri numbers, like dancehall queens in Jamaica. This is a story of Chutney Soca artist Rikki Jai worrying about not sounding like an Indian singing Calypso, then asking his mother to write Chutney Soca lyrics for him in Bhojpuri. This is the story of Remo wearing his disdain for Hindi film music like a talisman, even though his most popular songs are from Hindi films.