When Jaideep Varma was making the national award winning documentary Leaving Home—the Life and Music of Indian Ocean , little did he know his next musical non-feature would be on a band that was formed after watching his film. Starting off as an Indian Ocean covers band called Shunya, it graduated into alt-rock band Cityhaze. Seven years after Leaving Home released in theatres, a rare achievement for Indian documentaries, Varma’s Par Ek Din , on Cityhaze, debuted on YouTube last week.
It might sound self-aggrandising that Varma’s new subject should be inspired by his own work, but the film makes you believe that it is not, despite a casual plug.
His discovery of Cityhaze was quite accidental: band member Soham, the keyboard and tabla player, works with Varma for his cricket statistics project, Impact Index, and it took one drunken night for him to spill out his passion for music. Varma maintains his objectivity, but finds Cityhaze the next big thing in indie music and Par Ek Din is him betting on that.
Derivative music
What is it about Cityhaze that attracted Varma? “Not many bands are using our own Indian rootedness. Samyak (the vocalist and songwriter) brings in a small-town rootedness much like what Asheem (Chakravarty) did in Indian Ocean,” Varma tells me over the phone. “Other bands forget the India in Indian sound, and Indian sound is not just playing a sitar or something somewhere in the song. I don’t think our music scene is as exciting as people make it to be. It is very derivative.”
Cityhaze is an all-boy, five-member band (other members are Mallar, the guitarist and music producer, whom Varma calls the reason for Western influences in the band’s sound; Debrata, the drummer; and Abhigyan, the bassist). Still in their struggling stage, the 20-something boys are committed to music. Samyak quit journalism to pursue music; Mallar, who also works as a sound designer, is determined to produce his albums; the rest have day jobs with music as their true calling.
Par Ek Din is about catching a band still in formation. The voice-over, though sometimes overtly expository, runs as a casual conversation between director Varma, and cinematographer/ co-editor Harshad Nalwade (who is also the band’s college friend). The commentary gives the film the rare quality of being self-aware.
“Music has a certain energy,” says Varma. Which is why, I guess, he often cuts the conversations and jumps to showcasing their music because that’s where their real power of expression lies.
Cityhaze talks about urban alienation. One of their songs, ‘Nadiya’, goes: “Windows never open in this city; be it for celebration or for a crime;” while another called ‘Imaan’ talks about “small conscience in big city.” This urban solitude has crept into their own lives as well—they have never cared to find out, in the past one-and-a-half years, why their building lift doesn’t work properly. Their music is a response to their own reclusiveness.
“None of us goes out. We have all been doing our jobs. It gets to you. It drains you. By the end of the day, you don’t feel like meeting people,” Samyak tells me. And I, as an urban cogwheel myself, could completely relate to that feeling.
Not sad, just gloomy
But the boys lack showmanship. The response to their second live gig, at a shopping mall (which is not the right venue for their kind of music anyway), was not so encouraging. Lack of appreciation pushes them to become lonelier, and hence more such songs. “Our songs are not sad, they are gloomy,” one of them says in the film.
Like Leaving Home , this film too is chaptered with the band’s songs. It chronicles the band’s life between two important milestones: from recording in a studio for the first time to their first live performance. It also observes how finding the audience is not the only struggle—in fact, that’s a struggle for even a relatively established rock band Parwaaz, which Varma calls the most terrific band in the country right now. The larger struggle is to find a means of survival while pursuing music.
In the film’s most profound scene, the three talk these things through, a push-pull moment between their self-awareness and self-doubt. Later, Varma ponders in his voice-over—would the fresh voices of yore, like Rabbi Shergill, Lucky Ali, Indian Ocean have had a chance today, given the musical saturation and lower attention span? That is the biggest struggle Cityhaze is up against.
The writer is an urban cogwheel who finds solace in writing about films and music. @ThePuccaCritic
