The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption

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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.

The second story was of the making of the film, as Surabhi talked about the difficulties in editing the 81 hours of footage from the trip, “two years, one baby and seven reject letters later”. This is the story of highbrow culture in India, which is often available for free because it is highbrow, because only lowbrow culture is popular enough, or mainstream enough, to have a market price. This is a story I’ll repeatedly revisit through my year of exploring free culture and entertainment in Mumbai.

The third story was of a displaced Bihari, who doesn’t even understand Bhojpuri, feeling a primal pull on his heart, as he listened to the almost childish lyrics of the Bhojpuri song “my beloved, I’ll come along with you”. I’m that displaced Bihari, but my Trishanku-like state of being stuck between two worlds is the subject matter of another book.

It’s a little sad that a trailer of the film, or even a video of Denise Belfon’s soca hit ‘I am Lookin’ for an Indian Man’, is not available on YouTube, but you’ll get a sense of what I’m talking about from this clip –

• Why Time Out Mumbai is a Necessity for Me (6)
• Weekend #4: Three Movies and a Book (4)
• The Work-Watch-Spend Treadmill (4)
• The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard (1)
• The Relentless Pursuit of Joy ‘Into the Wild’ (20)