Lionnel Mascarenhas’ Kashmir Again video
I met Lionnel at Not Just Jazz by the Bay, Mumbai last month. He was performing there that night. It was like, what, some two or three years after going to any kind of rock show? Maybe more.
Watching Lionnel perform - just how do they get on stage and do all that? Somehow I have never understood performers. There is something in any performer that makes him / her public property at least for that little while. I guess that is what makes them what they are - they get up on stage, or get in front of the camera, and dance on a stage - and for that time and a bit more, your audience do not think of you as an individual, but as an entertainment machine. Here we are, entertain us!
These guys somehow manage to pull of that delicate balance between being the property of an audience, and then pull themselves back from it and reclaim their own selves. Amazing how they do it - single-dimensional people like me would probably lose our souls in such a situation! Of course, some of them would say that being on stage - that’s their real identity, not off the stage. I don’t even know what that means - but that’s what you would expect from me! Not qualified to talk about all this, frankly.
A long back, I read somewhere about the distinction between performing professions and desk professions. The performing professions, precisely because they were oriented towards pleasing the audience, were looked down upon by the elite classes for a long time. And now the tables have turned. (Tables have turned! Ridiculous it sounds.) To be young now is to have the ability to perform for a market - you can’t do it, and you are worthless. No good-looking girl is going to bother with you.
Now back to the Loins of Mascarenhas.
Lionnel and friend Jaideep Kulkarni have managed to make a video for the song Kashmir Again from his debut album Wonderland. Here it is. For those who are not very sure how these things work, click on the Play button, and once you see something on the screen immediately hit Pause. Now wait till the entire video loads - you can see that dull red bar slowly progressing to the end. Once its fully loaded, click Play again.
And now here is the Kashmir Again video.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CoeUDP6Pzk[/youtube]
