An experiment in light expression

This Monday I flew Jet Airways from Delhi to Bangalore and was pleasantly surprised by Jet Airways’ new in-flight entertainment system. The system has a good and contemporary music selection ranging from the unavoidable Himesh Reshammiya numbers to some good jazz. What stood out in the music experience was the jukebox function which allows users to quite easily select tracks and add them to a playlist. The jukebox does have its usability issues including 1) you cannot select songs from a particular album without actually selecting to ‘play’ that entire album 2) the playlist disappears from memory if the inflight entertainment system is shut off - which happened to the playlist i created before the flight took off 3) at some point you can get back to the main menu and have the song playing and have no way to turn off the song without actually selecting another one!

As such the system is quite visually savvy and the video selection isn’t all that bad but the availability of music in that 140 minutes flight made it a pleasant experience for me.
Apparantly the competition saw this coming and now Kingfisher has implemented Live TV in its flights - becoming one of the few airlines in the world to offer this service.

Last week, I had the fortune/sheer pleasure/gratuitous grace of attending my first live ‘Ruhaniyat’ concert of Sufi/Mystic music in Bangalore at the Bowring Institute off MG Road. One of the decent blog posts that lists each of the performances is at http://hariaddi.blogspot.com/2007/01/ruhaniyat.html
The word Ruhaniyat literally meaning soulfulness was aptly suited for this brilliantly conceived and well organized evening. The music ranged from baritone Tibetan monks (whose powerful and deep chanting much reminded me of Phillip Glass), to the qawwali of the Chisti brothers from Uttar Pradesh, to the Sufi songs of Patvathi Baul, Begum Hafiza from Assam, Fakirs from Hyderabad, and the Manganiyars from Rajasthan.

If you can get your hands on them, the Ruhaniyat concert archives are a goldmine. I have the CDs from the 2005 (thanks Aparna) and 2006 concerts so give me a holler and i’d be glad to share these with you.

On Dec 14, I braved about 90 minutes of insane Bangalore traffic to fend my way from Whitefield to Palace grounds for the Remember Shakti concert (thanks Hari for another good trip report).

This concert was quite special because I finally heard John Mclaughlin ‘live’. My first brush with McLaughlin’s music was in the heady summer of 2002 when I spent much of extended graduate school life in a musical haze. It was then that I first heard Mahavishnu Orchestra and Shakti and some of McLaughlin’s work with Paco de Lucia, Al De Meola, Trilok Gurtu, Carlos Santana. Some of my old friends including Leon from Minneapolis and Sabari from Mumbai have had run ins with John personally or through his music and it would be fair to say that in the ‘fusion world music’ or whatever other silly category McLaughlin’s jazz music is put within, his music has been an important reference point for me.
The concert had a mostly ambient and light feel, with moments of punctuated release by Selvaganesh and ‘Mandolin’ Srinivas and Shankar Mahadevan, and a few vigorous taals and riffs by Zakir and McLaughlin. I went away with a generally satisfied feeling, I suppose its unfair to expect personal epiphanies to arise even with such a stellar lineup.
I tried recording some of the music with my Nokia 6681 which was a BAD idea - the recording sucked when played later. : )