One thing that stands out is becoming a TED Fellow, a dream I have cherished from the first time I heard and read about TED a couple of years back!  I have always dreamt of speaking like those people on stage at TED, or atleast, sitting down and listening to them first hand and it seemed so unreachable until TED decided to hold a conference in Mysore in November!

I had a whole plan of getting in by hook or crook, my last resort was to try and convince the sound guys at TED to take me on as part of the crew! Which could have well worked :p – but becoming a TED Fellow seemed a much better way to do it!

I applied on a whim, not expecting to get in at all, but the selection was a dream come true and with a week to go for the conference, I couldn’t be more excited

Kiruba Shankar started the TED Fellows project trying to get all TED fellows profiled and Rohit Awasthi interviewed me a couple of days back as part of this project. Here are my answers to his questions originally posted on his blog at – http://www.rohitz.com/2009/10/keeping-the-groove-with-gaurav-vaz-ted-india-fellow/

1. How did Raghu Dixit Project help you in getting more perspectives about music and expectations of people?

The Raghu Dixit Project completely changed my perception about how the music scene in India can work. At a time when bands are complaining about the lack of gigs and various things that are “wrong” with the scene, we’ve played almost a gig a week last year!

When I joined the Raghu Dixit Project, I came from a much smaller band (my college band Phenom) and had a very constricted view of how things worked and about the type of music that I listened to and played. Infact, before I started playing with Raghu, I had never played a Kannada song on stage EVER! All that changed and how! Over the past 4 years that I have been actively involved in the project, we’ve toured 7 countries and played over a 100 shows and have taken our own original brand of music to places very few Indian bands have. The learning for me has been immense.

The Raghu Dixit Project is a testament to the fact that regional music works in India and also, the importance of being original with what you do. A decade back, a bunch of South Indians singing in Hindi and Kannada would have been brushed aside as a bad idea, but what we have managed to achieve in the last 2 years after releasing our debut album is quite extraordinary.

But frankly, that has been the easy part, these were songs we’ve played over a long time, and with them, have set the expectations of a LOT of people. Exceeding those expectations with the next album (due in the first half of next year) and giving the audience a whole new experience live is where we are focussing our energies and I am quite confident we won’t let people down there!

Q.2 What did the IT Industry (un)teach you?

When I was in Engineering College, I was told that I would not use most of what I studied there. I do was skeptical about that statement, but now I can completely vouch for it

Yet, it’s not that I didn’t learn much from the IT Industry. In reality, I learnt a lot from my first job at NetScaler; a dream-company, now called as Citrix. One of the most important things I learnt was that there is a LOT of money out there to be and it can be earned if you do things the right way.

Moreover, I was never the someone who could be coupled to his desk-job. I pursued my music and other passions along with my first job. My bosses there were most co-operative of my other pursuits and allowed me to take time off work. They redefined the concept of “flexible work hours”, i.e. all’s well as long as you get the work done. This is something I will never forget!

That job made me a happy man as I had the flexibility to work without interruption; was very productive at work then. I had a point to prove and the folks at NetScaler let me prove it! I will carry that work ethic with me wherever I go.

Q.3 Has Radioverve become profitable? What are the future plans? Is there any update about MuckWork?

RadioVeRVe was never meant to become ‘monetarily profitable’. However, the profit that we have gained is that we have achieved what we set out to achieve, i.e, to provide a platform to the Indian Indie scene and make “Indian Indie” a recognizable genre. This is an achievement because we started RadioVeRVe at a time when there was no other platform like it. Today there are similar, well performing platforms and that in itself is brilliant because we too are working towards the same.

Although, RadioVeRVe has been lying low for a year now (as Shreyas and I are figuring out our careers, and that there have been recent developments in the Indie music scene), I am working with OML Digtal (Part of Only Much Louder, founded by Vijay Nair). OML is supposed to be an evolved form of RadioVeRVe. The project has been named as NH7; after the longest national highway in India and should be ready by the end of this year. With NH7, we will work on Indie music, all over India.

MuckWork is currently on the back burner. But will be up soon as it is a fantastic idea; as some brilliant people alongwith Derek Sivers (my idol) are involved.

Q.4 From Phenom to TED India Fellowship, what has been the most challenging phase of your life?

I’m not sure I can point to one phase of my life and say, there, that was the most challenging! My career has shaped in such a way, that I am jumping from one challenge to the next. Managing my IT career, creating and running an online radio station and at the same time playing in one of the biggest bands in the country was quite challenging, but it was nothing compared to quitting IT and with it, letting go of that financial security blanket to work with someone you have admired for years! And then to the next challenge, building a brand new start up, setting off on a very ambitious dream and hoping to make a difference with it while working on how to take the band to a whole new level with our music and the way we market it in a music industry that is in such a state of flux and a world where physical boundaries are inconsequential.

All of these phases have been critical in helping me become the person I am today and I am lucky to have gone through all these phases because they ground you! The perspective you get when you carry your own equipment, wait for your turn, perform the show of your life, pack up and then go sell CDs to people after your gig can never be substituted when you try to build a store that will sell music!

Gaurav in a concert

Q.5 You mentioned in one of your interviews, “Be true to yourself”. Easier said than done. Has there been any time when you have given or almost gave to the easy way out?

Many times! There is always the temptation to stick to the “formula”. But today, its much easier, you can actually categorize and hold a ‘job’ that pays the bills when you work on what you are passionate about and have a good working balance between the two until you are actually ready and confident to go one way or the other. I’ve had a lot of things fall into place for me and that has helped me be true to myself but things just got started!

Q.6 The independent music scene in India is quite fragmented and you have been part of taking some initiatives to bring it together. How do you see it shaping up in the few years to come?

The Independent scene in India is all set to explode. It just requires the right trigger and its all building up now. The gigs have increased, the clubs holding these gigs have increased, there are a lot more original bands, musicians and most importantly, music has finally started to become an actual career for musicians and that is a sure sign.

People have started realizing that there is music beyond Bollywood, and infact, Bollywood has started recognizing that there is music beyond Bollywood.

Bands need to support each other and get more serious about their music, release quickly and release often and get more professional about how they go about their careers. The tools for all this are being put together by various people in the scene and very soon I am sure it will all come together very soon.

Q.7 Lastly, does the ring on the finger now makes it difficult to play the guitar or it is easier than before?

Well, I’ve played half a dozen gigs now with the ring on the finger and they’ve gone well, so I guess the ring is staying :p

But seriously, Shilpa has been the most amazing thing to happen to me. She has finally gotten used to the musician / entrepreneur lifestyle and even pretends to like it sometimes! and at this point, I can use all the support I can get. Also, guitar playing is never easy, it takes a lot of hard work!

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I am not religious in the true sense of the word and it is my opinion that most people have their own definition of what ‘God’ means to them and how religious they are and there is no universal definition that fits all.

I am a catholic, I do believe in a God who is modern and understanding and evolving with the times. I believe in my definition of my God! I am also a believer in the good side of my religion, and that religion is inherently good. Its just been crowded in a lot of controversy and there are many things I wish were different. But at heart, my religion preaches tolerance, love and peace, all of which I believe are good and should be preached!

I cannot point to one specific incident in my life and say, “Here .. this is why I believe in God”, its just the way I have been brought up by my parents. In retrospect, there have been many things in my life which have just gone right and I seem to have a lot of things working for me in all aspects of my life! while most people would attribute that to pure luck and hard work, I’d like to believe that there is a little more than that at play!

-Gaurav

Just like when we started dating, it was she who finally popped the question that mattered and I would be a fool to say No!. Its not very often in life that such good deals come your way and its then that you need to jump and pounce on them and never think twice even :p .. Okay .. so I am getting a little carried away

The official engagement, in the traditional style of the my family going over to her house and having a small engagement ceremony etc will happen in due course of time, but for all practical purposes, and as far as we are concerned, “We’re Engaged!”

For all you curious types and for those that doubted any part of this, here is the evidence!

Yes it is a diamond! .. and Yes! its the first one I’ve bought .. EVER!

When he told me he was coming to Bangalore next with his friend Loik, it was a chance of a life time for me atleast! I have always loved graffiti writers and the crazy typography, the colours and designs that they seem to so easily put up using really HUGE walls as canvasses!

After interacting with him and looking at pictures of his previous work, I was really curious to see the process of it being done from scratch. After a quick call to Carlton of Opus, who just loved the thought of it!, we were set to put some colour on the white walls of Opus and to keep Ivan happy, we decided to paint the outside wall that faced the road!

Now Ivan is not your regular graffiti writer, and he is extremely versatile in his style and approach to graffiti. He tries to imbibe the culture of the place that he is writing in and also in many cases mess with people’s stereotype notion of graffiti! He does this by doing things that are completely unexpected of a graffiti writer! My favourite being a guy with an angry face saying “Cut your Hair and Get a job!”

The only guidelines that he had to follow when he was deciding what to paint on the walls here were that whatever he does should not have any reference to Sex, Religion or Politics because all 3 are topics that could easily raise the ire of various factions here and we did not really want the attention or for what was being done to get vandalized later!

So Ivan came up with the idea of an elephant on roller skates, blowing a musical note out of its trunk and a very typical Indian Lorry style writing that says “Blow Horn Please”. His sketch on paper got all of us excited about what the final print on the wall will be like! So off we set to get spray cans to get started.

That was the first hurdle we faced also! Indian spray cans are not meant for graffiti, we get spray cans here whose nozzles are meant to spray on large surfaces and meant to cover a wide area instead of focussed lines with which you can make designs. And the nozzles that they brought from France would not fit the Indian cans, so after much searching and no luck, we decided to give it a shot with the cans we could find itself. Ivan had thankfully carried some cans from France which he would use for the borders and so he was sure he could get something decent in place.

We started around noon knowing that the office going traffic would have subsided on the roads and Ivan started by drawing the general outline of what he wanted to do which was then refined into a final blueprint.

The next step was to cover the larger areas of the design with simple block colours and have a basic illustration ready for detailing and shading or as he calls it – “Adding Volume”.

This is when we started getting a sizeable crowd interested in what was happening there and who was painting and why? When we tried explaining to them that it was an artist from France who was here to just paint for the sake of his art. He din’t want money, was not endorsed, was not promoting any brand, but just painting! Art for Art’s Sake! People were just dumbfounded!

They could not believe that someone would come from a foreign country and paint on the walls here and expect nothing in return but the fact that people would see his painting and smile! But the people who did get it were either in awe or just very happy! We got a lot of Auto drivers who told us that it was a nice thing that this was art that everyone could see and there was no fee for it, we were paid visits by the cops who were also happy that there was nothing offensive being painted and it was smooth sailing all the way!

We stopped for the day after we got most of the painting in place and decided to come back the next day for the lettering and the rest of the details.

The 2nd day posed a new set of problems, the usual way lettering is done (when you want a clean hard line for the letters) for graffiti is freehand and if you don’t find the right cans, you take the stencil route. We decided to try creating a stencil with tape and then spraying inside that stencil and then removing the tape. But when we removed the first line of tape, it removed paint from the walls and some of the graffiti as well! This was something that was not expected and threw us off completely! So it was a LOT of fixing small areas and Ivan, being the perfectionist that he is, could not live with anything but the absolute perfect best!

So after a lot of hacks, we figured out the right pressure and the correct amount of tape and finally managed to get the lettering in place with the last bit of lettering done with a brush infact because it was just impossible to spray and get letters that fine!

After about 8 hours of graffiti writing, where about 4 of them were just because of the quality of the raw materials, we finally managed a brilliant piece of graffiti which I think is a first in Bangalore! Here it is to see for yourself and also the proud artist along with his work

A huge round of thanks to the folks at Opus who loved the idea and were brilliant hosts and helped in so many little things during the making of this work. From here on, to find Opus, go down Palace road till you see an elephant on the wall on the left side. See it, backtrack about 50 feet, and there it is!

Also, cheers to Ivan and Loik, true artists who do things from the heart and practice their art purely for art’s sake in today’s highly commercial world! I made two friends over the past weekend and will hold you to your promise of hosting me when I come to France!

]]> http://gauravvaz.com/art-for-arts-sake/feed/ 14 http://gauravvaz.com/my-experiments-with-photojournalism/ http://gauravvaz.com/my-experiments-with-photojournalism/#comments Wed, 11 Mar 2009 21:47:27 +0000 Gaurav http://gauravvaz.com/?p=225 Ever since I started getting somewhere with my photography, I’ve wanted to do photojournalism. Its just something that I have been wanting to do for quite sometime now.

So after waiting for the right time to come along and waiting to see if I can get some “assignments” hooked up to do something, I have decided its time to start doing something on my own.

A couple of months back, Shilpa and I had decided to wake up early on weekends and go do a story on the street dogs in Bangalore, and that is one of the first few stories I would want to start with.

What I wanted from you guys is suggestions for stories that I can go shoot and write about in Bangalore. I am not looking for complicated month long projects, I would like suggestions for small projects that would possibly take me a couple of hours a week and help me hone my skills.

Also, if anything I do is of interest to you and you want to join in, or if you want to use anything that I do, please do write to me at mail at gauravvaz dot com and I’ll be more than glad to work with you!

Infact, I would never have thought that this would be possible, but I think I would happily move here and have a ball of a time doing it! I have made good friends and great connections with the place and its people. This doesn’t mean or indicate in any way that I am contemplating moving out of good ol’ Bengaluru anytime soon, I have way too much invested in there to make that shift, lots of friends and also the great hometown advantage that I am not ready to lose just yet :p

Yesterday, Shilpa and I, along with two of Shilpa’s ex-roomies and frequent interspersed visits by my good friend Samira, spent the day roaming the streets of Bombay indulging in Shilpa’s favourite passtime (shopping of course!) and I began to think about how much this city had to offer and how Bangalore, which started with promise has now disintegrated to a very badly run and organized place which, if you look beyond the gloss, has very little to offer!

Its really time to take Bangalore back to what it once was and promised to become and make the most of what Bangalore can offer! and it offers a LOT.

More to come soon.

So after about a year of meeting and putting song ideas together and getting things in place, we finally are ready to unleash ourselves on the whole wide world! or atleast our circle of friends.

We have always wanted to play our first show for our friends whom we personally invite and ask for their feedback after the show and while we planned to do it initially in Jason’s house, we thought of Opus and the Sunday brunch was just too perfect a chance to pass up

So tomorrow, we premiere a lot of the original material we have written (we’ve written enough for a full length album BTW) and a couple of covers we thought would be fun to do! and we’d love to have some feedback from the everyone who comes to the show about the band and the music and what you liked and more importantly, what you din’t like!

If you are in Bangalore, please do consider this a personal invitation to come to Opus at 2 PM and watch Allegro Fudge’s debut show and after that, please do take some time to send us mail, or just post a comment or even catch one of us and tell us what you think of it all!

Website – http://allegrofudge.com

Email – music@allegrofudge.com

So the first in my series is the most widely acclaimed dish that totally lives up to its fame – Drunken Beef at Shiok / Moss.

I was introduced to this dish in the very early days of Shiok and all of us heard about Madhu Menon who started this restaurant after getting out of the IT industry etc.

In his own words, Drunken Beef is “The top-selling beef dish at my restaurant, Shiok. Beef is stir-fried with a fiery mix of chillies, garlic, and basil.” and I completely vouch for it!

Any time I go to Shiok or to the newly launched Moss Lounge, this starter is a must and I completely recommend that you try it!

“Changeling” did precisely that and so much more! Its about a mother’s search for her missing son and how things twist and turn in the most interesting ways! Whats more, its based on a true story!

What I liked about the movie is that even though its got so much emotion running, its still not a sob fest! and by the time the interval comes up in the movie, you are fully revved up to go up and help that lady with what is happening in her life!

Its a brilliant story and an even better movie. The casting for the movie is perfect to say the least! You really sympathise with Angelina Jolie as she goes through her part of the story, you really and I mean really detest the negative character in the movie and after the lawyer in the movie did his bit in the court room, there was applause in the theatre!

I fully recommend that you go watch this movie but remember, it might overcome you at times Definitely not for kids though!

I din’t hesitate a moment and we readily agreed to give out the music for the film. I completely forgot about that film and it was only yesterday at the TFA awards, where Ram had been shortlisted for an award in the creative writing category, that I met him and he told me that the short film was complete and was uploaded onto Youtube and asked if I had seen it!

A quick search brought the film up and I must say I love the way its turned out, though Ram vehemently states that its not how they intended it to turn out, I like the feel of the film and considering that this was shot with almost no budget with a simple handy cam and all actors in the film doing this as a hobby, its a really nice effort!

Check it out yourself and let me now what you think! Also, If you haven’t yet done it, please go and download the Phenom album from our site, its dated now, but the songs are still very nice

Direct Link to the film – http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=KVZx8A-OERY