A crowd extra, a guest appearance, and a rainstorm

Scene one.

A basketball tournament in St Xavier’s College. The traditional season opener for the game in the city. All the best teams in Bombay would play. Among them, several from the Nagpada area, nursery of many greats of the game. For the Bombay Central YMCA, one of the players is a fair-skinned man. You look closer, and yes, it is that guy who seems to always play the white man in Hindi cinema. On court, he plays the hard, fast game that that corner of the city specialised in, asking, and giving, no quarter on account of actor status or age (he was a bit older than most of the other players, barring a few India team veterans). In the half-court messing about before the game you, with several other undergrad students who take shots at the basket while the teams are getting ready, have actually passed him the ball a few times, attempting not to be too star-struck and never being so gauche as to ask for an autograph.

One game stands out a little clearer than the others in that distant memory. The Xavier’s Sports Club, a team of the best players in the college and some ex-students who continued to play the game, had its strongest line-up in years. Among them, Joe, an American and Marco, a German. In front of a partisan audience, the home team played out of their skins. There were fouls galore, including one where a Bombay Central player rolled in agony clutching his dislocated shoulder, and when the ref paid no heed, got up and continued the game. The roughness of the game extended to the gamesmanship: the Nagpada lads were fluent cussers — one had heard that even the fair-skinned actor liked to catch opponents off-guard by letting fly in fluent Urdu — and the Xavier’s boys were no slouches either. At one point, Joe, one of those tall, burly corn-fed Americans, stood chest to chest with the actor. “You have a big mouth,” he said. The reply didn’t miss a beat: “Not as big as your stomach.”

(The sports club lost eventually.)

Scene two.

A recording studio. You are a rookie voice-over artist. Perhaps because of your name, you’ve been called in to read the voice of a British pilot. An accomplished actor who happens to be fair-skinned is doing an American pilot’s voice.

You struggle a bit, not knowing whether to aim for posh or street. You don’t do too well, and are miserable. In the loo, the actor, who has delivered all his lines on the first take, and then offered variations — you remember now that that was the only time, before or since, you’ve heard him speak American — offers a few comforting words, with no trace of an American accent. You stammer a thank you and try to do better. You manage, and you leave with an even warmer spot in your heart for the man.

Scene three.

A poetry reading in an art gallery. Several of the city’s best-known poets are reading. The host has kindly invited a few unknown poets in too; you are the least accomplished of them. Before the reading, you discover that that actor is here, and will be on stage too. Your heart sinks: how do you measure up to that guy? But then, you say to yourself, if you goof here, no one will remember with this star around.

You meet briefly before the performance. He is greying now, with some wrinkles around the eyes. He is adjusting his boots. He looks up, says something like “You have an unusual name.” You, not star-struck at all, no, no, manage to come up with the fantastically original “You too.” Strangely, the earth does not open and swallow you.

He is the only one not carrying paper. (This was before smartphones.) He recites several Urdu couplets, and a poem he wrote as a young man. Then he reads a poem you have encountered, by a Delhi poet. It is one word, one syllable: rain, repeated many times. You have dismissed this “poem” in your mind; you had put quotes around the word when dismissing it. You don’t remember now how many times that single word is repeated, but it’s a lot. The actor gives every repetition a different inflection, now booming like thunder overhead, now like the wet mist caressing a hillside cloud, now sharp and cold and piercing, now mad fury. You have never been so glad to be comprehensively outclassed.

End notes.

One day, you tell yourself many times, you will talk to this man properly and try and learn a bit. One day, perhaps you will interview him. But that never comes to pass.

You wouldn’t have remembered these little cameos I made in your life, but thank you, and Godspeed, Tom Alter.

[In The Hindu]

The festival that runs itself (almost)

The Goa Project’s press release quotes co-founder Udhay Shankar as saying that the vision is “to create a community of passion at the intersection of disciplines for cross-pollination and innovation to happen organically.” In person, Mr. Shankar, who is a Bangalore-based investor and consultant, eschews the gobbled-gook and is far more direct about what he sees as the core for him: “I want to be in the middle of smart people — when I say ‘smart people’ I mean people who I consider to be smarter than I am in whatever way you want to measure it; smart is a context-specific term — and articulate people all the time and learn and grow.”

The Goa Project is an annual ‘unconference’ that happens, unsurprisingly, in Goa. The format, while better known in the tech geek world, is not unknown in other fields. Simplistically put, it comprises sessions proposed and voted up or down by the attendees. TGP sessions are in eight ‘tracks’: Music & Sound, Design, Interactive Media & Cinema, Performing Arts, Fringe & Geekery, Society/Education, Workshops, and Presentations. There are different slots in each track, including lectures and lightning talks, debates, Q&As, demonstrations. There is a space reserved for projects, where selected innovators look for support, through collaboration or even funding.

Mr. Shankar says that TGP is partly a descendant of a mailing list he runs, Silk List, a by-invitation virtual space where members with shared interests also tend to meet up in the real world. And that meet-up practice in turns has its roots in pre-Web online spaces like BBS groups. “The most immediate trigger was myself and Vijay [Anand, the other co-founder] having a series of discussions when both of us were volunteers at a NASSCOM Product Conclave in about 2009 or so, about how this was intended to be the seed of a movement that brought together people in the products space, and from there it went to how it would be nice to have spaces like this for other communities as well. And not just restricted to one kind of community; but to pull together interesting people.” Nothing happened immediately, though the conversation continued, until Mr. Anand one day said, “Why not just go ahead and do this?” The friends had discussed the idea with others, and got uniformly positive responses; in fact people wanted to help. “Typically, the response we got was, when do we start?” Mr Shankar says.

The unconventional format was arrived at after observing a range of international events, from Burning Man to TED: “We were reasonably sure that that was not what we wanted to be,” he says. “One, there already exists a TED, and two, we wanted to do something a little more unstructured. We wanted to see what would happen when we put together all the smartest people we know.” And why Goa? “We wanted to do it in a place where people don’t have work pressures. We could have chosen to do it in a place like Leh or the Nilgiris, but in addition to selling the concept, we didn’t want to sell the venue as well, and Goa is a venue that doesn’t need to be sold.”

‘The Goa Project’ was the working title, and one that survived a naming exercise by professionals (but volunteers) from branding agencies and marketing. “We went through the entire exercise of coming up with a name, evaluating them,” Mr Shankar says, “and decided eventually that ‘The Goa Project’ was a good enough name.”

An interesting facet of the festival is that the core team, who are all volunteers (most are busy professionals the rest of the year), do not just give their time; they even pay their own way to be a part of it.

Anindo Ghosh, who has been involved with TGP since its second year, and has curated tracks as well as been a speaker, puts it simply: “It’s become like family.” But what contributes to that atmosphere? “It’s the way it is run. Everyone has a voice.” Mekin Maheshwari, formerly of Flipkart and Yahoo, now running a foundation which aims to develop entrepreneurial mindsets amongst youth from difficult backgrounds, says it is the perspectives he gets and the people he meets that he prizes, which he attributes to the way the “open, warm and egalitarian” way the festival is run. For Javeeth Ahamed, business development professional and manager of the projects track, it is the drive to create that he gets from being at TGP that is the draw — he added ‘author’ to his bio because being at TGP inspired him to write his first novel — that, and a desire to give back, because “I’ve got here because people helped me, and this is a way I can help other people.” There’s also a selfish motive, he says: “The contacts! The people I meet here… I feel empowered, like I can find someone to help for anything I need, or someone else needs.”

How does the actual event list evolve? Rashmi Dhanwani, an independent arts consultant and curator when she is not being a part of TGP’s core team, says, “The process starts even before the funnel [the process by which prospective presenters pitch their sessions] is open when track managers and curators reach out to their networks and tell them about TGP, asking them to propose sessions and ideas. Once the funnel is open, it’s about keeping an eye on proposals coming in, reaching out to proposers to better understand their ideas and taking mental notes about the quality of the proposals. Once the funnel is closed and the final confirmations have to be made, it’s about finding those subtle balances between sessions that will make for an interesting event. We try to be as inclusive as possible. We also look at proposals through the POV of the audience, and try to choose sessions that are about an idea rather than a plug for a product.” It doesn’t stop there, Mr. Ghosh explains; there is then close collaboration with presenters, helping fine-tune, understand audience cues, coach them in dealing with questions.

The projects track grew organically from the festival, Mr. Ahamed says. So many people had found support for their projects at TGP that it made sense to make that a formal part of the event, which it is now, with a tie-up with the crowd-funding site Wishberry. TGP invites applications and selects a few projects that will get to make their pitches at the festival. Mr. Ahamed says that the big issue for most crowd-funding efforts is getting that initial seed funding, and the impetus from a TGP pitch has helped these firestarters get some kind of take-off velocity. This year, there has been a conscious decision to have only arts-related projects pitching: being presented are a board game, a documentary, and a folk music collective.

For the rest, there as session ranging from hot-button geeky topics like crypto-currency and 3-D printing to using public interest litigation to save the environment and engaging with the Indian conservative, to more flower-child areas like creative movement therapy and relaxation with the didgeridoo vibrations. Mr. Ghosh says that attendees are invited, encouraged even, to walk out of sessions, walk into others, then go back, to participate vigorously. “Don’t be surprised if a track organiser strongly suggests you attend a session, perhaps even propels you to one,” he says laughing. In response to a question about the inherent chaos of an unconference, which may unsettle more traditional minds, he says that it is, under the surface, far more organised in advance, as other core team members have pointed out, with and contingency plans for presenters who couldn’t make it. For instance the calibre of attendees means that there are potential presenters in the audience who could do impromptu sessions, and the organising team are also ready to step into the breach at any time.

The feel of TGP is one of vibrancy, but also of relaxed informality, which isn’t just because of the flip-flops and bright T-shirts. The physical space, at Bay 15, a resort in the Dona Paula area of Panjim, is designed to promote that informality, and exploit the fact that at any reasonably organised meeting of minds, like a seminar or conference, the true value of attending — in a time when feeds of presentations can be viewed online easily — is the networking. “The most valuable conversations are the hallway conversations,” Mr Shankar says. “In some sense, what we’re trying to do is to make as much of this hallway conversation as possible. It’s not just the kind of sessions, it is about the physical layout of the spaces as well. You have, at any given point, four different things happening; that means there are four different spaces. You have to make a choice about where you’re going to be, you may need to wander from space to space. The layout is such that you have to pass through a community space, which includes an important community gathering spot, the bar. The whole idea is to throw people together.”

Goa undoubtedly attracts the conference market, but for most attendees, interaction with Goa and Goans is limited to the buffet, the bar, and the beach, and the hotel waitstaff. TGP wants to be more a part of Goa. “But honestly, we haven’t done as good a job as we would like to, but we’re trying,” Mr. Shankar says. “Some of it is because our networks aren’t as strong here as they are elsewhere. This time, we’re partnering with several local organisations including the GCCI, an industry body, and a few artists. We’re also planning to have a student pass to encourage more students to show up, in the hope that these are the folks who will anchor TGP in future years. The idea being that even though we heavily subsidise the cost of attending TGP, it might still be out of reach for a student.”

The other big change is that the organisers have formalised the structure, and have formed a non-profit, Atman Creative and Knowledge Development Foundation. “We intend to do stuff year-round instead of only the annual event,” Mr. Shankar says. “And some of this will continue to happen under the official umbrella of TGP.” Is it to enable donations and to be able to offer donors tax deductions? “Eventually, yes,” he says. “But we don’t yet have [that paperwork] in place. More importantly, we wanted to preserve the non-commercial aspect of it. You know, once you run an event a couple of times reasonably successfully, a lot of well-meaning people will come and give you advice on how to commercialise it. But commercialising also means that you optimise for revenue, which is not what we want to do. This is a passion project for us, and due to that it has taken on a certain character, attracted a certain set of people, and we want to protect that character as much as possible.”

Disclosure: The writer attempted to earn a pass to the event with a pitch. It got two votes.

Candles in the wind

In a world where bad news is in no short supply, in a profession where atrocities are on the daily news list, some tragedies hurt more than others.

Journalists of almost every leaning were jolted when Gauri Lankesh was murdered; here was a journalist killed, gunned down, not in war zone or in some troubled but remote part of the country, but in cold blood, on the doorstep of her home in one of India’s busiest metropolises. We shouldn’t have been more distressed by this atrocity than by the assassinations of so many others in our profession but, what gods there may be forgive us, we were. We said to each other, This could have been you. Or me.

In a city where nine or ten people die on the tracks every day, falling from or being knocked down by trains or being hit while dangling from a coach overburdened to a ludicrous degree, one more senseless rail tragedy shouldn’t have penetrated our callused souls. But we’ve all travelled those trains at some point, even those who, like this writer, can now afford four wheels and a guaranteed window seat. As the city’s business district migrated north and split up like so many amoeba, many of us work or have worked in Lower Parel or thereabouts, and have exited the local trains at that railway station and, shoulder to shoulder with the MBAs and the office assistants, battled our way out of the sardine cans, through the scrum on that pedestrian bridge and out into the dubious charms of the erstwhile mills district, on our way to the upcycled godowns and shiny glass towers where, amidst the banks and MNCs and upmarket watering holes, our publications, now freed from the need to house printing presses, send out the news and views in bits and bytes.

We stay unflustered, because that’s what we’re supposed to do. We call and WhatsApp our colleagues and chivvy or are chivvied for ground reports. We monitor the social media channels, looking for more information. When the grim list comes in, we scan it quickly for familiar names and then breathe a sigh of relief and go back to the newsgathering, a little ashamed of that relief. We point our cameras at the stray shoes left behind knowing how powerful the image will be, we hit the record buttons on our phones and stick them in the faces of the weeping, we go to hospitals, overcome our human tendency not to bother the distressed and ask people in hospital beds questions, we edit, trimming lines for greater impact, spellchecking copy typed with one finger on cellphones, scouring our memories and the web for background material the reporter is too busy to include in her copy. We plan the questions we will ask of power tomorrow.

It’s the job. It’s not as soul-battering as being a first responder or an emergency room medic. It’s just news. We file, we move on.

As we send in the story about the twentysomething chartered accountant in her first job or the lifelong best friends who were on their way to the Dadar flower market to buy offerings for the gods for their community puja, we let the thought surface, This could have been you. Or me. And then a photographer sends in a picture of candles lining that pedestrian bridge, a small bunch of marigolds among them. A homage to those who died. It’s silly. It’s symbolism. But then, some of us, we break down and cry.

[In The Hindu]