The Mafia chills

My friend and organiser of various august assemblies like the BYOFF in Puri (Bring Your Own Film Festival) Gurpal ‘Jugaad’ Singh mailed me some weeks ago. He was manufacturing new mazza (or majja as we call it in these parts), this time named MAFIA (Musicians, Artists, Filmmakers, Interesting loag...Ajaao). And so about 15 of us trickled down to an undisclosed location for a two and a half day Mafia gathering. A 360 degree horizon, two dogs, a few spirited kids, a well-stocked fridge...we had the beginnings of a family holiday here... But there was work to do. My kind of hard work. We had to first go down to the river pool and drink beer and watch the kids and dogs gambol in the clean water. As the sun set we had to meander back and someone fired up the BBQ; the guitars, keyboard and jambe, tun-tunna, kalimba and other instruments were tuned up, and the stars were marshalled in fantastic numbers. The bar was declared open. Our city-shrunk eyes and traffic-numbed ears opened wide. Initial reticence and reserve (yep, even the Mafiosi can be shy sometimes) began to evaporate. Tipu, Manoj, Kaamod, Pankaj, Sudarshan...wove one of those magic spells in which one song leads to another and then another – utter stream of consciousness and free-association....jumping across eras and styles and regions - RD to Rehman, folk to classical, Himachali love songs to Koli geet. Junior-artistes like me sang in the background, bolstered by the sounds of great voices and magic instruments. Ankit’s (him of the 20 words per day quota) camera rolled softly.
The night turned gun-metal cold (ok, I had to sneak in a Mafia-type metaphor) and various people’s resolve to sleep out in the open quietly dissolved. While we bunked down in warm rooms, some people did stretch out on the terrace. The next day dawned crisp. Much tea, bhurji, fruit appeared out of nowhere (thanks to our host Rajan Anand’s people) and we settled down to watch films that people had brought along. Err...where’s the DVD player? While it made its way to us along with more Mafia members by noon, I read bits and pieces from my forthcoming book, The Counsel of Strangers. I also narrated to the Mafia about some of the indignities and absurdities of being published in India. The Great Indian School Show is what we saw post lunch (which also magically appeared in front of us) – Avinash Deshpande’s film about a CCTV-obsessed school where Big Brother is watching you, and how! Evening saw us rolling newspapers exactly in the way that one rolls the other thing – it was Sudarshan’s lec-dem on making fantastic things with just newspaper and fevicol. Sujata’s bad back eased up and she braved it down to the water in the evening with us.
This soporific, unstructured, chill time was punctuated by a highly agenda-driven dog named Spice. Ankit and I were her victims, as she stalked us, tracked us down, harangued us and clouted us smartly on the head if we didn’t play with her. You had to throw stones, no rocks... no, boulders, for this feisty (polite word for criminally insane) animal. Surabhi’s films I didn’t get to see, as I had to get back home. But her brief telling of the Mirs’ predicament remains with me (count me in when you put those funds together, Surabhi). The other thing that I couldn’t be in on was investigative journalist and filmmaker Saif’s anecdotes and insights; as also Avinash’s film on farmer suicides. I believe there was an active and nuanced discussion there. Ashish Tyagi, painter and filmmaker had not brought any of his work to share.. .he was just chilling out.. likewise for his wife payal...the candle maker and their little toddler Nihal, who was amazingly unfazed by the two large and boisterous dogs.
When you step off your usual path and go someplace like this, you come home with your mind pictures and sounds changed, re-set. For me, the abiding sense-impressions are of city kids Sana and Rishab splashing in a clean flowing pool, Sudarshan’s hypnotic kalimba-plucking, Manoj’s Jagjit Singh, Pankaj’s Himachali songs; Tipu’s drumming, Kaamod’s haunting ‘Raavi kay us paar, sajanwa’ and perhaps George’s big soft laugh. And of course Gurpal’s piquant word play.
Does hanging loose with artists across genres work as some kind of ‘osmosis’ process? Certainly, in several ways. One, simply the act of taking your work and holding it up in front of people from other genres, gives you a sidelight on your own processes. Then, watching and listening to other people’s work and their take on various issues and emotions, created surprising and delightful little bridges between our different worlds. For those some hours, we all became more than our work, schedules, deadlines, plans and frustrations. This then, were the gentle meanderings of the first MAFIA meet.