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My last post had ended with reminiscing over MJ and his leaving us too soon. I miss him... or to be more precise... his presence in this world... Sigh... :(
Anyways...on to more light-hearted stuff...before I start on how bloody-effing-amazing the experience of doing the Tribute to MJ had been... I do want to mention a few other fun times that GT experienced during 2009...
The first one has to do with two shows we had outside Dhaka city. It was a NOKIA event, and as part of the launching strategy for their latest cell phone to hit the Dhaka market, they were arranging all these shows across Bangladesh... Chittagong, Sylhet, Bogura, Rajshahi and Khulna...called the “Nokia Boishakhi Music Mela”. We were asked by the agency which handles Nokia, to open for the main band...Warfaze. Unfortunately due to work and study pressures, we could only accept the dates for the last two cities...:(
Boy it was hectic. But it was so much fun! All road trips are, and if you get paid for something that you love doing...well...all I can say is “Woohooo!”
Because my back was still in its ‘recovery’ mode I went lying down the whole way..lol..taking up the space of two people :P..my feet resting on Saif’s lap...
One of our closest friends..Sabir...accompanied us on these trips...he's kind of like our very own "LIVE" entertainment. He kept trying to pull Jasper's leg ALL the time throughout the trip :D. I recall one time... while we were returning to Dhaka.. Jasper's dad called, asking about our whereabouts...and Sabir on the spot blurted out "Jamurki!" And Jasper actually told his dad "Amra akhon Jamurki'te" (We're in Jamurki)..and then after hanging up, went "What the fudge is Jamurkiii????"
The show at Rajshahi was our first brush with the mass audience outside Dhaka city. And we soon came to realize that forget GrooveTrap... and even Warfaze. This crowd was purely the L.R.B/Ayub Bachchu and Nagar Baul/James crowd...Beyond the Warfaze songs which had gained mass popularity, the audience were not that overly familiar with the band’s full discography.
So it was a lesson well learnt. For Khulna, we went on to include AB’s “Mon Chaile Mon Pabey” and James’ “Sultana Bibiana” in our setlist...a nice lil medley of the two..hehe. Jasper came on stage, bespectacled, wearing his Bermuda shorts,...and went on to shout out to the crowd... “Khulna! Kotha kom! Kaj Beshi!” Afff...such a nice mimic of James he is ..down to the singing! Haha. Needless to say we made the crowd go wild that time.
Anyways...the overall trip to Khulna was way better than Rajshahi. We were put up in a fab hotel in Khulna..Hotel Royal International...where other than the nicely furnished rooms, the food was excellent. Best part? A complementary glass of fresh juice (the lemon one is AWESOME) served with the three basic meals of the day :D
As Russel Peters would say.. A Class!
The best ‘gift’ we got out of this show was about four months down the road. We had gained a fan in Khulna who, while on a sojourn to Dhaka, called up our bassist, Adil Bhai, (he’d saved the number back during the tour)...and requested to come to one of our live shows if we were having any.
And so we invited him over to our gig at the Nokia Glitterbug event on August 13th... :) and took a snap together...
Sigh... (this one’s a good sigh... hehe)
Anyways, the second experience I am going to elaborate on in my next post. For now all I’ll say is that it involved an illicit love affair...a murder...and a whole lot of hair-spray!
Cheerio!
Clockwise from bottom left: Sabir, Jasper & Me, On with the show, Saif, the crowd at Khulna, Me lying in the micro, the current GT line-up on a launch
Hello everyone…
On yesterday’s post I’d left you all at the point where I’d been talking about our tribute to ABBA shows at the Dhaka and Chittagong Clubs. Of these, the latter stands out quite starkly in my mind.
It was a Thursday…the 25th of June.
The show was the most fun we’ve had in a while. After all, it’s given that there’ll always be an increased level of excitement when performing in any shows outside Dhaka city, that involves any modicum of travelling. The setting, the crowd…it’s all different…all new. We were even accompanied by a guest performer, Sunny...who's one of my friend, Tooki's, bro-in-law :)..that is Sunny's her hubby, Sham's (who's also my friend) younger sibling. He was playing as our second keyboardist.
Laila had toned down her script a little to avoid any faux-pas with the more conservative Chatgaiyyas (n.b. before this statement makes your hackles rise, my hubby is one and I’m just stating a widely known sentiment here…not making any personal attacks, lol) and I remember that while I’d travelled by plane to Chittagong because of my back pain, the rest of the GT gang, along with a couple of friends, had opted to travel by a microbus. They’d started off early morning on the day of the show and all other variables remaining constant, should have arrived in Chittagong by one in the afternoon…max.
Well if only life was a fairytale. Well it isn’t. And there are no fairy godmothers to help out either.
The micro met with a slight miss-hap along the way…near Kachpur bridge…and was declared, on the spot, unfit for further travel.
And so the gang waited in a ramshackle of a tong’er dokan (i.e. roadside tea-stall) for another micro to come all the way from Dhaka. Needless to say, by the time they arrived at the club, all their energy had fizzled out, Shammu Bhai’s nerves were frayed to the point of non-existence, and we had only a couple of hours in our hands to perform a sound check and then get ready for the main show.
As usual, once the show started the adrenaline rush kicked in. The best part was when we all ganged-up on one of our closest friends, Fahim, to play a small, small part in the script during Laila’s rendition of “Does Your Mother Know?”. He was simply fab on stage…all cocky and sure…until Laila, struck with sudden inspiration and as befitting her character in the play, started unbuttoning his shirt…haha! Then he became all flustered and kept re-fastening his buttons as soon as Laila was working them open…:D It was a classic candid-camera moment.
Once the ABBA tribute had been wrapped up, the crowd and our manager-cum-biggest cheerleader Shammu bhai, started clamoring for a usual GrooveTrap “set list” of songs. And so we made the crowd shake their bootie with a few popular tracks, and as is our trademark, ended the set with Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”.
We then sat down to sample the rather interesting menu...biriyani with red wine. It didn’t matter that Saif and I are teetotalers. We could still sympathize with the rest of the diners, who were thrown into a mild state of confusion over the whole thing. The biriyani was fab though. In fact, everything was fab with the world. The DJ had come on, and high on the feel-good rush at the end of a great gig, we danced till our feet couldn’t take it anymore. Then while I went to bed (the boring girl that I am…well I did have a raging headache!), the whole gang stayed up till nearly 4 AM, playing UNO in one of the bigger rooms.
None of us…nor the rest of the world, I can say…could have predicted what was coming next…
The following morning we all woke up to the terribly shocking news. Michael Jackson had passed away…apparently of cardiac arrest. It’s eerie how one remembers every single detail of a moment in time when faced with a situation that is simply to horrible to grasp. I can describe that day to a tee. And I kept thinking about how we’d been planning to do a tribute to MJ since the beginning of the year…and not just perform his songs but put forth a full-fledged show with his most famous dance sequences. And we’d performed “Thriller” just the night before! And now some nondescript news presenter on television was claiming that he was gone?!? How was that even possible?
The guys were all a bit stunned by the whole episode I’d say. They couldn’t express their feelings quite as easily and the only way they were able to pay their respects to this iconic entertainer was on the road back home. Saif tuned the micro’s radio to the same frequency as his cell phone’s FM transmitter and then proceeded to play MJ’s full discography saved in his playlist, all the way from Dhaka to Chittagong.
I think that is perhaps the most beautiful aspect of MJ’s legacy.
There are many ways one can mourn the loss of someone in their lives. But if you celebrate the very essence…the core principles…that that person stood for, I believe that it is the best way he or she would like to be held in remembrance.
With MJ…it was his music, his love for entertaining and performing, his immense capacity for imagination…that helped him reach out to millions of people all over the world. And so it is by reveling in his songs…be it by listening to them, performing them or even sharing them with future generations…that we show him true respect.
So today I’d like to leave you all with a few lines from one of my favourite MJ songs...
“I’m starting with the man in the mirror
I’m asking him to change his ways
And no message could’ve been any clearer
If you wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and make that change!”
Anti-clockwise from top right: The infamous tong'er dokan, Shammu Bhai & his lovely wife Zarah (we'd just landed at Ctg airport), sound check, Laila & moi, singing ABBA!, the performing troupe! - Photo credits my cell phone & Rahul's cam
Road trips. Or train journeys. Ok. Here’s a quick multiple choice question quiz as to what’s the best part about such sojourns, be it cruising down the roads in your car or chugging down the railways of our country to some far off, distant place.
Yes, yes. I know. Some of you might claim that it’s the beautiful sceneries that zip past the windows. Music aficionados might sing off-key praises about the importance of arranging all the amazing and ‘feel good’ music in your mp3 or your car’s CD collection – the ultimate ‘road trip’ or ‘train journey’ playlist. Alright, I admit that these have to be a quintessential part of the whole traveling experience but aren’t we forgetting the one thing that is absolutely unique to our country? Any guesses? Anyone? No? Sigh! How can we leave out or survive without our tong’er dokans. They should have reached a cult-status by now…
One has to admit that once you start feeling all the cramps and aches and pains down your legs and back (or alternately your bladder starts protesting against incessant pressure), it feels like absolute heaven to stop the car by a quaint, little roadside tea stall and get down to stretch a little (or alternately put your bladder to rest nearby some unresisting shrub).
The creaking, wooden benches, permanent appendages in front of the stall, somehow feel way more comfortable than the seats of your car and the tiny cups seem to be just the perfect size for holding the right amount of tea. Talking about the tea…the guys who run these places seem to have down making sickeningly, sweet dudh cha (milk tea) down pat. But strangely enough, they don’t taste sickening on these trips. In fact, they seem to morph into the best damn tasting tea ever made on the face of this planet. The rong cha (milk-less tea) taste equally good with the water taking on this interesting, slippery texture due to being simmered over the stove non-stop in a metal pot.
As for the proprietors I just mentioned. Well. Somehow my dad, or my uncle, or my brother – yes, it’s this guy thing – always seem to end up striking up with them what seems to be the most riveting conversations this side of a cocktail party. Must be something in the tea.
The road trips aside, the train journeys have their own perks when it comes to these tong’er dokans. There’s not a lot of walking you can do inside a cramped train and not surprisingly the stopovers en-route to your destination feels like mini-trips within your big trip. The tea stalls bear gratifying similarities to their roadside cousins, thank god, and the best part about such stops is that there’s always this little drama involved of making sure one doesn’t miss the train. Yes. Run, baby, run.
For those of you who’re completely in the mist about what I’ve written so far, I’d recommend that you ask someone within your circle of friends, who’s a road trip or train journey connoisseur, to take you on one. After that, if you don’t re-read this article and go “Ah!” then I should take up another career like say…traveling. Here that rapid-fire tinkle of a spinning spoon inside a tea cup? That’s a tonger dokan calling out to me to do just that.
Want to go for a ride?
With temperatures racing upwards every day, you sure don't need to be reminded that summer’s here. The fluctuating temperatures between the hot, humid outdoors and the cool confines of AC’ed rooms have clothes sticking to you as soon as you step outside, not to mention giving you severe cases of dreaded summer colds. Besides, one’s precious ACs are of no use with our famed powercuts and loadshedding. The heat seems to make you more sluggish at work and all you feel is like taking a break from it all and spending some time with mother nature as your only company, albeit with all the basic amenities near at hand so that you don’t need a vacation from the vacation you’re taking! The best part about getting away during the summer is that since it’s off season, the hotel prices are nearly slashed to half their peak rates and the ‘holidaying crowd’ is blessedly minimal. Translation? You can really enjoy a trip in true solace and silence.
Approximately only a 4 hours drive by car or bus from Dhaka, how about traveling to the lush and lovely tea gardens Sylhet is so famous for? There is the beautiful Zakaria City and Jaflong, and you might also want to include a visit to the shrine of Hajrat Shahjalal (R) and take in the mesmerizing effect of the water fall, Madhabkunda. Enjoy the Monipuri Tribal maidens doing their famous dance for you, and besides checking out the shopping malls there, be sure to drop in at London Fried Chicken, a local franchise company in town opened by a guy from London, said to have some of the best fried chicken you’ve had for ages.
Let’s by-pass the rather clichéd Cox’s Bazaar shall we? Let’s foray into a place a little bit more difficult to access but well worth the effort. All you romantics will surely love Kuakata, locally known as Shagor Konnya (Daughter of the Sea), the only beach in Bangladesh where you can enjoy watching both sunrises and sunsets. Kuakata means “digging a well” and there’s a two hundred year old kua (well) here built by the Rakhine tribe, who’ve settled in Kuakata from Myanmar. Keranipara is the nearest Rakhine village from the beach, where you can visit a 100 year old Buddhist temple named “Seema Mandir” with an incarnation of Buddha made of eight different metals. Parjatan Holiday Homes at Kuakata is the safest and coziest place to stay although there are a number of other hotels around the badh (dam).
In Rangamati, you can enjoy the wondrous beauty of Khagrachori waterfall, the blue, blue water of the man-made Kaptai Lake with its hanging bridge, the colorful tribal life and culture, jeep rides through hills and dales, attractive handicrafts…yes the list is seemingly endless. Suvolong, surrounded by the waters of Kaptai Lake, is sure to make even the weariest hearts feel they’re on paradise – yes it’s that beautiful. And oh yes…those of you with a sweet tooth should know that the sweetmeat of Suvolong is famous for their delicious taste. Also, try to spend a night with a good book and your mp3 player on the nearby island resort “Peda Ting Ting”, which in Chakma apparently means “take food, take rest and go”. You can catch the sunset and sunrise over the lakes and mountains. The island has three cottages for rent, named “Radhamon”, “Dhonpuri” and “Tanyabi”, and a restaurant where you can enjoy indigenous specialties like chicken baked in bamboo and grilled fish fresh from the lake. Yum!
Now for all you Indiana Jones types, how about a spell at the Sundarbans or Bandarbans? I have it on good authority from my deshtrotting friends that Bengal Tours and Guide Tours have some of the best deals for these places. They offer a lot of different tour packages depending on how many days you want to stay, what kind of cabins you want in their launches, what kind of food you’d prefer, etc. But the minimum decent package would cost around BDT 5,000 to 6,000.
In Sundarbans, your main accommodation will be the launch and you can go on daily boat rides to sigh in wonder over the mangrove forests and wild deers, and gasp over large and lazy crocs sun tanning on the riverbeds. The large and lazy part is quite deceiving as I’ve seen these beasts disappear with lightening speed into the waters, when a boat gets too close for their comfort. And if you’re really desperate to spot a Royal Bengal Tiger, although chances of that are very slim, you can even stay overnight on a macha (wooden watching tower) at Hiran Point…if you want to, given that the guides won’t stay with you or take any such responsibility otherwise. They’ll simply leave you there around dusk with a lantern, food and blankets. If you survive the ordeal, they’ll come to fetch you come next morning. Unless you have nine lives, best not indulge in such daredevil acts. For those of you not interested in roughing it and prefer soaking in art, history and culture, try visiting the shrine of Lalan Shah or the Shilaidaha Thakur Bari, where you can see the daily usage materials of Rabindranath Tagore’s family.
Bandarban, wilder than the other two hill districts, Khagrachari and Rangamati, boasts deep forests, high hills, innumerable springs and the simple life of the tribes. There are 11 different tribes living in Bandarban, so it’s a town of mixed cultures. Besides the tribal people’s holy places, there are Hindu temples, Kangs (Buddhist temples), mosques and churches. Bandarban is ideal for trekking and hiking. An exciting and popular trekking route is that to Keokradong, the highest peak in Bangladesh, and staying overnight in a tribal village is a requisite of this trip. It’s also possible to cover the second highest peak, Tahjingdong in the same trekking route. And for those of you who might not find all that walking up their pants, you can try out the “Quantum Meditation Resort”, established in Lama, for some spiritual pursuit in natural surroundings.
So if you’re feeling as if the summer heat’s making Dhaka life even more oppressive than usual, simply get away from the chaos of modern life and rejuvenate in the natural surroundings of our beautiful mother land. Just one last word of advice. Do make Odomos your best friend during these trips and not the mosquitoes...haha – bon voyage!
Useful links:
http://www.bengaltours.com/index.html#
http://www.guidetours.com/home.html
http://www.bangladeshecotours.com/bangla.html
http://www.bdyellowbook.com/catalog/Tour___Travel/
http://www.quanfey.org/Pages/MeditationResort.html
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