Dear all,
How I wish you guys had made it to Ziro this year! I can’t begin to describe what an incredible adventure it was. So, let me just start from where I am right now and how I got here.
It’s Saturday morning and I’m lying in a tent for four, in ‘Artist City’. It is the beginning of day three out of four. On two of the other four mattresses are friends who could not manage to stagger back to their own tent after our bonfire jam wound up at 7 a.m.
It’s about noon right now and drizzling. The ceaseless pitter-patter soothes my mild Adi-Apong hangover. Adi-Apong is the finer rice wine available here. When I got here two days ago, I got so excited by the range of local tribal alcohol, I drank every variety in that one night. By 3 a.m., it had reacted with my gut, almost exactly like eight cheap Long Island teas would. It was a mess, and thus my first night wrapped up fairly early.
Last night, however, I was fuelled till 7 a.m. on Adi-Apong, served in a foot-long shoot of bamboo. In that same stall, they served shots of stronger local brews that came in bamboo shot glasses about 3-inch high. Here, it’s all about having an appetite for the new and unexplored. That broadly sums up the personality of the artistes and festival-goers here. As one of the Tetseo Sisters said, “You need time on your hands and the heart of an adventurer to come and enjoy this little piece of heaven.”
Enroute here though, I wondered to myself, “This journey had better be worth it.” It took me about 36 hours to get here. Fly from Bangalore to Kolkata to Guwahati, with a stopover in each city. Then a 10-hour train ride to Naharlagun Station and then a seven-hour bus ride in the rain. Normally, this ride would have taken than 5 hours, but with sudden rains, we experienced two landslides and took two U-turns. There were times when boulders — the size of refrigerators — just rolled off the hill and lay in the middle of the road; all shiny, glistening and reeking of ill-will. On either side you could see the hills constantly bleeding streams of mud and gravel. It was almost as if this part of the country was pushing us out with constant threats of physical danger. This drama was broken only by the delicious stop for food, where the local dhaba-like restaurant served us a thali of local fish curry, chicken curry and mutton curry for Rs. 300 per head.
The food in this part of the world is an omnivore’s dream. Coming from the nearly-omnivore state of Kerala, I’m proud of our handle on the meats. But these people in the far Northeast are at another level. At the festival, I ate smoked pork, roasted pork, pork chilli, pork curry, beef fry, smoked beef, chicken curry, chicken shreds, whole roasted grasshoppers and whole fried frogs. I could not get myself to eat rat. And unfortunately, drunken me, missed the silk worm servings.
But enough of the food, drink and travel. At the core of this festival are the people and the music. The locals are super-friendly, warm, generous and know their music. How many places in our country can brag about rock and roll being part of their local culture? Every second person can play a guitar and everyone sings from the bottom of their rice beer-soaked gut.
The day stage was definitely the more fun stage, with a backdrop of lush green hills, fields and 5 p.m. sunsets. Gowri Jayakumar and Alisha Bhatth had the crowd standing there, with nothing but their guitars and voices. For me, the Barmer Boys were possibly the discovery of the festival, with their flamboyant Rajasthani showmanship. On the night stage though, an acquired taste for the weird made me fall in love with the Assamese band, Digital Suicide, which had a few hilarious tracks. There was even a song about how the Naga chilli affects their bowels — all songs were accompanied with hand actions, mind you. Naturally, my trained musician friends hated it.
But you guys need to come and judge this for yourself. Next year, I propose that we come back here. But this time on an army of Enfields — dodging boulders and all.
Much love,
Jacob Cherian
