Fireflies Festival of Sacred Music

I haven’t blogged in a while – so hello all of you out there who still bother to check this blog. I’ve been keeping myself busy with work and travel. Most recently, I went here. The Fireflies Festival of Sacred Music in the outskirts of Bangalore last weekend, was an experience that I suppose many people have had the good fortune to experience, possibly multiple times, but I was a first-timer there and boy was I glad I went. There is something about sitting in an amphitheatre watching performances under a banyan tree in the middle of almost-nowhere that is soul-breaking and soul-making at the same time. Soul-breaking because it made me feel that I’d been wasting a lot of my life so far, and soul-making because some of it was music that I’d never heard before – and I’m talking jazz, Sufi, Hindustani classical, alternative soul, indo-western fusion, instrumental (and what instruments – drum beats that are primordial, tribal, whatever you’d like to call it, the flute that sounded like it was singing your song, trumpets, the sax, harmonicas – instruments that I don’t hear on a day-to-day basis that sounded so strong, real and melodious I wished I knew how to play them all).

If you’re slightly high (on whatever, let’s not elaborate now), then so much the better!