Utopia, of a kind...

A long, late night drive from Noida to ITO along wide, empty roads (the chrome yellow of streetlights throbbing dully on the slick, tar-black roads) got Aby and me to SPA for Utopia, a couple of nights ago. It was really the best counterpoint to an otherwise uneventful weekend, recreation-wise.

Now SPA is a charming, old world type of institution and Utopia, its annual cultural fest is supposed to be one of those much awaited affairs, where anyone off the streets can walk in and partake of the revelry, only no one actually does. There are only, ever, a few handfuls of people in attendance- all of them students, most of them undergraduates, with far too much time on their hands to let an evening of music, weed and booze just go by.

So Utopia turns out to be charming and old world, much like the host institute, where everyone knows everyone and the music's mostly good, the booze mostly free and the weed... Well, the weed's just weed, isn't it?

And I realised, as I stood there semi-headbanging to (mostly) passably thrashed out metal played by young, amateur bands that made up for their lack of virtuosity with their abundant energy and enthusiasm and generously sprinkled doses of cuss words in the lyrics of their self-styled compositions, that this is, precisely, what I love about these gigs- the fact that everyone knows everyone, and that everyone's there to have a good time and there's booze and weed and good-natured banter, and there's music too and it doesn't matter if those guys on stage aren't the best in the business!

No professionally organised rock show, with top bill artists, can ever hope to evoke the same kind of magic. The bonhomie is, almost always, missing. And though the music may be good, nay- the best, its still not quite the same thing...

Perhaps that explains my frequent visits to CityPulse, when I was in Ahmedabad, to listen to Purple Flower playing their stock repertoire, weekend after weekend. I mean, yes, no one plays CCR better than CCR but then you wouldn't get to sit down and share a smoke and trade a few laughs with Fogerty right after he's finished playing Proud Mary, would you?

So that's the clincher, really- the sense of belonging. And even though the cops turned up at around 10.30 to put a stop to all the loudness and noise, people still hung about and chatted and smoked up and caught up on each other's lives. I'd like to think everyone had a good time, all things considered, and that's really all that matters, isn't it?