MFM Jams in Faridabad! 22nd June-the Dream comes true!

So finally the junoonis have marked the beginning of the routine every sunday jam in Faridabad as well.Here I'll share the first sunday jam which wasnt planneed or organised but just happened, the Almighty had laid out the plans for it.
I practised with three students, Tarun, Manav and Vipul who have begun playing the guitar really well now for sometime and we left for SRS mall along with my roomies and friends G.G. and Vikas (remember the support staff in the previous post) and reached there at around 8:00 p.m.
The very purpose of MFM as well as the MFM music school is taking shape now. I believe it is the dawn of a new era here, where I can imagine the unifying essence of music reaching every heart and spreading harmony and positivity around.
I can feel it now, the musical revolution that was sparked off when we planned to bring MFM to Faridabad and begun with the opening of the music school to start and support the propagation of the concept.
The junoon is rubbing off on all the students and now it'll reach many others with the beginning of the jams now.It was like the first passout batch of the school getting ready to jam who'll soon be joined by others forming the evergrowing MFM jam band.
It was a very satisfying moment for the teacher inside me to see three of my pupils walking the path i wish to see them on.I always believe that the music of a Musician gives him a great power that can heal wounded hearts and mend broken ties in the society.So the concept came very naturally to me and i thanks Suraj Bhaiya for this Enlightenment.
Lets start the action now.We started with my favourite, "Dosti" and then "Khudi" by "Junoon". These songs with their message of friendship, hope and faith really fire me up. Some other students, Vinny, Vipul, Chanakya of our school too joined the jam and Vinny and Vipul did a great job keeping high energy levels really drowned in the junoon. And our manager saab G.G. and Vikas too were doing great singing,dancing and cheering up the crowd. It was great to see them all enjoying the jam so much.
The people came, few stayed and most took notice but left but we were unfazed. I see those dreams where one day this junoon will strike many a hearts. and a few did stay with us and the feeling was very nice, the energies of the people around in harmony. and we just belted out one song after another keeping levels high. One of the guys, Arvind from the crowd sang with us throughout the jam and another one, Rishi too joined the party.I could see smiles all around(cloud no. 9). People fromall castes adn religions who hardly have time for each other stood there together enjoying the song and dance act. SANGEET KE RANG MEIN RANG RAHE THE SAB.
We had a dance performance too from a guy there who spread many cheers around. i could feel an unknown energy surrounding the jam which was radiating and reaching the people out there.
The jam was all masti and music was what people wanted so i could hardly interact with people. Although Vikas and G.G. did manage to interact with a few people. But i felt even this all masti routine served the purpose nicely as it did manage to bring smiles on the many faces around.
And what can be better than the joys that we managed to scatter over there. There must have been many people bogged down with troubles, many with pains in their heart and we could bring joy to them for a few moments at least.
Time for some pics.

Vikas and Tarun(taking requests)

The foursome on guitars L to R: Manav, Vipul, Myself and Tarun

Yeh Vipul (mast chora) guitar ki khair nahi is drummer ke hath mein

Rishi and Arvind, the two guys who sang till the last note from the guitars

MFM @ Faridabad: The Jam Spawns

Two great pieces of news! Sulabh , who connects to the concept of the movement really well, just made a post on the MFM Faridabad (http://mfmfaridabad.blogspot.com) chronicle about the little concert we did back in march in the women's Polytechnic, thanks to Ms. Poonam, a highly spiritual individual and who really appreciated the concept of MFM, of voicing 'simple sense' to the youth through participatory musical gatherings, or the 'MFM jam' and allowed us to play in front of a great group of students at the Polytechnic.! Do checkout the post! although this jam was not the open, democratic jam like the jams we do here, it was more of a performance , as we were not allowed to have people participate with us in the singing. we were also on a stage with a mic and all, so that also is not too conducive to have people come and join in.

Moreover, these guys (Sulabh, Gaurav Garg, GG, Vikas, Nidhi and the rest of the gang) have started a jam there from this Sunday as well! and with good response! Sulabh is soon going to make a post of it on the mfmfaridabad chronicle! so lets soon check out how the jam went!! eager eager!!

cheers!

Welcome June! The Grand Jam of 1st June 08

So No more visiting! Come Sunday and I get a "We're Jamming" SMS from Tarun (Great coordination!) and I left Borivali to make a halt at Andheri collect a newly bought Guitar (So the guitar has been bought!) (!) and was at Bandstand in time, venturing into the battlefield alone! Got some heart warming welcoming glances from an elderly couple and I was eager to get on! Suddenly find Deepti (great to see her after a long time) zoom in (with her great bubbly energy!) with her mother and we were ready to go! For a change we started with a bit of 'intrumental' playing; the guitar (new) was sounding great and the sound of guitar over the murmur of the sea and drifting in the sweet moist air as always makes me see the beauty of this whole thing about jamming by the sea! OK!

So after that we sing the by now 'standard' opening : 'Write about it' and 'Simple Man'. Then I make some frantic calls so see why no-one's coming (from the gang I mean) and then we jump in to speak about the concept and start playing, Deepti cheering up everybody and the jam catches momentum! We begin and then Gauri floats in and I say oh great! Plenty of participation and some people saying 'sher-o-shayari'; a notable instance when a girl from the audience, not wanting to come down to the stage, opened up to render a song when given so much encouragement from the crowd, It was a very nice incidence in the jam.

Then we sang 'Bandeh' and spoke about reflecting a bit about our habits and the energy footprint and making a bit of effort about carrying that jute bag to the market instead of gathering all those messy plastic bags.
And then all the ganag poured in gradually (mmm..late attendance register! !) Gajendra took over the guitar duties along with Pulin and a friend (oops cant recall his name).

Kekoo came in with Pradeep as well and he was really glad to see the jam in its glory! He joined in and we continued till it was 10!
All in all a great jam and great to see things happening so well, great coordination, though missed Chintan, Monika (who takes over the 'Jam leadership' often..! ) and Aditya's great playing!

So there's music for meaning for us, with its lively spirit, music for particiaption, music for oneness, music for forgiveness, music for tolerance! The jam goes on with forces

Here are some pics Could shoot towards the end of the jam:

The Jam of 25th May : "In the words of a visitor"

"In the words of a visitor" here has two implications: one that i was almost a visitor to this jam, and the other -Aditya , who's now in Mumbai, was amazingly blazingly nice to make a writeup of his experience of the jam(all by the great arrangement of Vinay!). And amazingly encouraging words are they! But before I let those precious words be seen, I will obviously do my customary ranting!

The Sunday I had gone to ISKCON Temple's Youth Forum to be part of their activities, attended a great lecture, did some dancing(They have a 'Kirtan' which is just like our jams) over beats of the Mridanga and Kartaals and had the hounour of doing some 'Seva': Serving food to the people who came to the lecture. Then I left rushingly to get some sleep and then head for the Jam, But back home I felt rather low and undecided about the jam-Tarun was in Gujarat and I had not brought my guitar back from Bhopal, so I thought maybe the stars are not aligned for the jam and since I had arrived unnannounced (I guess nobody knew I was in Mumbai), it was a chance to see how the jam was being coordinated..err..mmm..

I liked the idea that everyone had decided regarding the coordination: "everyone is coming by default-but people who are not coming phone in"

And great to have Sada Vinay Jee in the jam!

Before I go ahead, some news is that when I was in Bhopal, with the enthusiasm and drive of Naveen (our self appointed band manager!) we jammed by the Shahpura lake- and with great results, a lot of people came over and joined in, although with my earlier memory of jamming in another city, chandigarh that is, I was not really expecting such a great turnout! People just loved it! lots of people wanting to know if the jam will go on the next sunday as well!

Now, in the great words of the " second visitor" (Aditya that is) (no one remains a visitor in the jam for long! we're all soon part of the jam family, like it or not!)

I was standing outside the Andheri station at 6:15to visit a friend there, waiting for him to come and pick me up last sunday when it suddenly stuck me that visiting the MFM Jam is a huge possibility!Boy! how on earth could that slip off my mind? SO immediately i scrolled through my phonebook and dialled Vinay's number, finding much to my surprise, our Dear Dharmendra Pa Ji answering the call!! Whoa! Vinay was too much in a cinematic mode so th best thing to do was to ask him for aapka Suraj's number and call him up to know the JAM's whereabouts.The phone rang and Suraj picked up, a bit confused when I tell him my name but relieved and happy when I remind him which Aditya this is ( ;) )I'm surprised when Suraj says he was skeptical about the JAM happening but now that even I'm coming, said the JAM should go on and that he'll make it to our favorite spot opposite Camp Juice Corner in a short while as soon as he's bought a guitar, without which the JAM is quite impossible. Now this is Suraj an this is what we talk about when we talk about his enthusuasm for this initiative.When he says 'The Jam must go on', he truly & deeply means it!So we hang up on the mutual promise of meeting up at the same place in about a hour.It's 7:45 and i suddenly realize that it's a bit too late and that I should start for the JAM and so i say the byes and leave for the JAM in an auto who promises to take me there in not more than half an hour irrespective of the evil traffic that engulfs Mumbai on a busy Sunday evening.I was growing impatient by the patient. Impatient due to 2 reasons:reason a :: The last (and only) time i jammed was more than a month ago!reason b :: It was an electrifying day!So here i was sitting in the auto waiting to meet the legends of MFM rock with the clock now showing 8:50.Oh yes, my dear friend and Classmate from NIFT, Anshuman Srivastava was also intrigued by this idea and my descriptions of the JAM that he too was excited and eager to join in, was already there before me and sitting there with Vinay (Dharam Pa Ji) and Aapka Suraj.So finally I reached only to find the Jam in full swing with the numbers ( I don't remember but i guess it was some song by strings). The stage was set.The mood was there.Everybody was seated.. and those standing, on their feet and hands in the air.The Hellos happened and as soon as this song finished, Suraj and party requested me to wail out Toota Toota ek Parinda. So Suraj plays and Aditya Sings and so does everybody else and this is where u realise that its not your voice or his voice.. It's our voice. Its Unison. Period.The Jam proceeds and suddenly there's a new instrument in my hand. The Bongo!It's painful if u have'nt played this Beat Instrument in a long time and for my delicate fingers.. ouch!!But with Suraj and the other cheerful and Energetic lads backing u up.. the pain does'nt feel and every good song ended up with a Guitar-Bongo combo JAM which was amazing fun (though i got a swollen index finger for three days)!!

P.S.: I did not buy the guitar, just the belt and we mamanged to strap it over kailash's guitar, which was the lone guitar of the jam! "Kailash Meri belt wapas kar! hahaha!" and I DID bring a Bongo to the jam, which I was playing alone, with Ali watching in despair, (before anyone turned up) and got a a very nice and sweet "please could you stop playing this for a while" from an aunty (while she might have wanted to say "could you please stop banging on those 2 cylinders which make noise of the most exquisite nature like a madman?" haha!)

P.S. 2: And thanks Aditya for Christening our crazy guitaring as "energy"! We often compromise nmusical presentation for the sake of the engulfing energy and that has become a habit!

Bandra Chalo!: The Jam of 6th April 08

Happy Navratras to all! So we jammed the Sunday gone by, With a lot of the old people on board again..Vinay, Me( Suraj that is!), Tarun, Kailash and Vijeeth and it was great guns! ..but Missed Chintan, Monika, Gauri, Pulin.
It was great to have Aditya Dipankar ( http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=9125229749940862084) come all the way from Bangalore to jam with us! He is great on the guitar and rendered beautiful numbers like 'Teri Deewani', 'Dooba Dooba'; 'Hey Bhagwaan' and 'Im in Mumbai Waiting for a Miracle' two beautiful songs from Raghu Dixit's self titled new Album! and not to forget 'Khudee' by Junoon
Just the day before, Id gone out with my roommate, Madhur, to the Juhu beach
and we'd taken the guitar along..and we had a great nice session of playing, mostly for ourselves there, squatting on the beach, when we gradually broke out into playing in our frantic frenzy style...and made some friends there, and talked to Tanya, one of our few appreciative audiences about the concept and asked her to be there at Bandstand for the Sunday's Jam; It was great to see her in the jam!

We started with "Write about it" from Lynyrd Skynyrd and I just feel so connected to that song..It makes we wish the whole world were a village, living at a pace which shows respect to the pace of nature..see this article on 'Appropriate technology' : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriate_technology

We moved on to our by now tried and trusted and rusted intro of the concept: "aap thodee der ke liye bhool jaiye kee aap kitni badi gaadee chalate hai, ya kitne chote ghar me rehete hai" and "for once forget all the judgements in your mind and become one on this platform of music" etc etc.
and then we moved on to playing some popular stuff, 'mae ree' (Tarun wont let one jam go until I wail out that song) and then we moved on to taking some requests, which Vinay and Aditya were pleased to play. We had Anil Swami who took to the djembe intermittently and it was great jamming with him!
We had great participation, with some real original compositions by some real people from the earthy, dhoti-kurta facet of India, accompanied by our unruly team of guitar toting (and drum bearing), disorganized, wanting-to-wail-out-a-message-to-the-world team of 'musicians'!

We finished with Vinay playing 'Baadshah in Jail' by Indian Ocean, Aditya Playing 'Khudee ko kar Buland' by Junoon and me with 'Laal Meri Pat' and 'Sanu Ek Pal Chain naa Aawey', done in our own "we are our own music" style!
Thats what Music For Meaning stands for me in a big way, a simple small scale platform to bring out creativity from all across-from the untrained, rusty folk innards of India to the refined Gharanas to us 'Moderns'; to become a fuzon melting pot enabling small community events-a platform for unhindered social interaction.

Here's the pic-story!:

The 'Band' is sprinkled like pepper in salt!

oyeee! attitude? noooooo! thats some real 'song acting' (=acting out a song!)

This Guy who incidentally collects stuff nobody wants lying around, lying around (repetetion is intended) (which somebody throws) has ART inisde him! Khai ke Paan Banaras wala!

This guy from (a Village who's name I forget) in Bihar had some real neat compositions..about mata pita kee seva nahi karoge tau chaar janam tak dukkh paooge and some real nice bhajans! Incidentally you see me (jee haan aapka pyaara Suraj) standing encouraging company to the little uncertain performers!

Swami (On the Djembe) was a one from the audience who played with us! Vinay (stooping over the guitar) and Aditya (Arm over the guitar) give great company!

Cheers! Tarun finally makes it in this pic!

No Windup pic this time! Sorry! from all of us at MFM..take the cares and keep the faiths and be Good and May God bless all!

Resurgence of Hope: Bandra Beckons

Monika called for an early start of the jam, lets be there by five thirty for it gets late by the time we pack up,she said. So I engaged express gear, had a mysore plain dosa all done in ghee at my favourite restaurant, with guitar lying silently by my side. I reached bandstand sharp at five thirty. While en route from bandra station to the promenade, the autorickshawala who did the courtsey of locomoting yours truly, gave me oodles of gyan about lending money and applying your mind in some cases. He was one major music lover and would not let me get off before I rendered and cramped in the auto version of 'ik hasina thee'.

At the peomenade alone and wondering what to do..to wait or start my customary wailing of my signature song 'simple man' I remembered to call Kekoo, told him that most of us were gathering that day. Then when i sat down to write something, Mark, a Pastor as I later discovered, came up and asked me what I was upto. He told me of the miracles that started happening in his life when he 'surrendered to the kingdom of God'. A very nice man he blessed me and promised to come and check us out later as we played. Prashanti and Pulin, silent witnesses to this episode were lying low, camouflaged as the audience. Some time later, swiss time miss Monika came, only to be reminded by me of the Indianness in her swiss time.

After some customary greetings and all we begun, with the song simple man, and the energies grew. We went on to play mae ree, and when we had a nice crowd, introduced the concept. We picked up issues..said stuff about not judging each other and forgiveness which was well recieved with specific incidences in the jam to relate to. Most of us think our lives are working exclusive of the community and the society and we fail to relate that all that happens to all effects all.

As an old uncle came down to sing some beauts from the retro zone..there were cheers all around..we picked up tempo and the jam erupted when people could not contain their energies any longer and we all stepped down to dance. Vinay came somewhere towards the end of the jam and took to playing Bandeh by Indian ocean which I had played already and much more nicely (hehe) , Pulin was in good mood and swing as well, with Prashanti taking to the photo duties. Monika, her usual bubbly self got everybody cheering with her energy.

Kailash and Pulin did some songs as well, though we missed Tarun. The jam goes on, it brings people together, it gives belief to all of us with the meaning in our music. It gives us an outlet to say out what we want to say, it ignites the musician hidden in many people..the jam's a good thing! We talked to Kekoo after the jam, and he gave his inputs regarding forming a core group of people who work on MFM and its growth. With all his love he promised that he will continue to support us on MFM...he is God's hand to us!
Here are the pics:

Words of Wisdom: I listen to Pastor Mark

Pulin 'Strikes a Chord'

Great Guitar fingers! there is potential there, Kailash, Prashanti and Monika



We 'Roll with it'. I sing and dance while Monika cheers everyone.

This guy came up and did a great job, while his girlfriend cheered! great to have people contribute to our frog's croakings!

Chakk De Phatte. All the way from Sada Punjab. This guy has become a regular contributor and sings with a lot of heart!

'Maei ke Laal Jaikishan' , Thats our desi Michael Jackson.

Vinay entered late and started hoarse screaming!

The Return of MFM - 10th Jan 2008

Well well well...to begin with I would like to apologise on behalf of all MFM members for being very very late to post a blog here...
For all those of you who thought that MFM and its members have disappeared we are back...We have returned...The return was not all that a full fleged rocking jam and we couldn't manage to gather a large audience we still managed to capture the hearts and bring back smiles on the faces of those many regulars who have been coming sunday after sunday waiting for us even in our absence...
The jam started off with Yogi who sang all alone for a while until Pulin and Monika joined in...I was late though...We our regular songs, introduced MFM and for sure - played people's requests...It was fun and more importantly the mark of a new begining of MFM which will keep going on and on and on...
Hope to see you all wonderful people soon back there...Same time..Same Place - 6.30pm, Bandstand, Bandra[w]...
sorry, no pics....