ARR again

I attended ARR's concert in fairfax, VA. Needless to say, absolutely fantastic. A lot went into the screen(stage)-play of it, much more than I had expected. Completely non-stop show - less than a minute gap between two pieces and that too continuously for 3 hours. some cribbed about show starting half n hour late. Hariharan never fails to create the magic. and life is a waste if you haven't seen sukhwinder perform chaiyaa chaiyya (the elongated version with thaiyya thaiyya, etc) on stage. he has a voice to die for.

caught some sync mistakes - i kept wondering for how much of it were we taken a ride for. (arr stops playing piano to mute his cell phone while the piano sound keeps playing). khair, sukhwinder singh and hariharan were pure and perfect. no praises enuf for sivamani. other guys need to play up to the crowd more, and more importantly, learn to be in sur. i didnt find pray for me brother particularly fascinating except for the haunting muffled short interlude. the amazing part was the cell phones lighting up the stadium - never seen something like that, totally heavenly. there were people falling for neeti mohan, few knew who she was.

the wide range of compositions all back to back made you wonder if the genius look like arr. no drooling is enough. here's the latest interview. the stress on innocence n purity is impressive. also impressive is the effort he puts in getting to those elusive tunes. i found a recent one on youtube here (there are 11 or 12 parts to it) where he is grilled suitably (sometimes gets too cliche, sometimes interesting) by prabhu chawla and arr takes it in a child-like flow. seems that he is being more candid these days as his confidence improves.

bollywood coming

Three fantastic movies released in a row - bheja fry, metro, cheeni kum. all extremely watchable. they beat the familiar bollywood genre by miles. should we say bollywood reality cinema?

metro is dark and i guess therefore less liked. cheeni kum is definitely not nishabd (not that the latter was any lesser). i guess bheja fry was lapped up the most because of the humor. nevertheless, cheeni kum oozes sarcasm and its a delight to see them carry it off without being even slightly obnoxious.

all of them are highly mature presentations and done without strain, almost effortlessly - as if we have been doing that all the time. in retrospect, it is almost unbelievable that these were bollywood presentations.

PS:
JBJ is due this week. lets see. i didnt like bol na halke halke earlier mainly because it wasnt clear whether to be soft or not to be soft. anyhow, the melody is just too sweet to not fall for. rahat fateh ali does the magic again.