Blog

Every once in a way, a newspaper sub-editor gets bored of the thunder thighs of the hotties spread-eagled across his 16 pages of page three and decides to pay lip service to the “Indian rock movement”. It was the Deccan Chronicle‘s turn to add their whiff to that gigantic puff of effluvium.

In a tired-sounding article imaginatively titled ‘Fund-amental gigs‘, an unnamed DC correspondent wrote on Feb 20:

It was in the late 1990s that Thermal and a Quarter organised shows, free of corporate sponsorships. But, after a few such gigs, and without much success, the concept faded away. Almost a decade later, another city act has decided to commit themselves to this cause and is spearheading a ‘movement’, thus inspiring a generation of young musicians.

The other city act is, of course, Lounge Piranha, which pulled off a cracker of a show along with the (now) Bangalore-based Gowri and Hyderabad’s Native Tongue at the Alliance Francaise de Bangalore on February 13. We attended that concert.

We appreciate the indie-mindedness of the journalist’s effort but perhaps the anonymous correspondent might want to get out of his Mighty Strange office and do some real legwork for a change while writing about the bands that don’t circulate press releases of their events. For instance, he/she could have taken a bus (or billed the company for a cab) to Opus in the Creek on Whitefield Road on February 14, the day after the show he/she covered, to watch the One Small Love concert, a completely un-sponsored affair with no gate collections to break even.

And here’s another correction: Our last un-sponsored gig before this was Floodaid, a fundraiser for the families affected by the Asian tsunami featuring Antaragni, at the St John’s auditorium on January 4, 2005, a good six years after the late 1990s. No sponsors, sir/ma’am. Uh-uh.

Heck, just because we issued no press release doesn’t mean it didn’t happen!

Dear correspondent, you have been nominated for the PaperPulitzers 2010 in the Best Armchair Journalist category.