Month 1 at Mehli Mehta

I finally have a few moments to sit and write a few thoughts about the past 1.5 months.  It’s been a whirlwind, but I’ve been very much enjoying the teaching.  Charis here, at the Mehli Mehta Music Foundation, the third WAMer in Mumbai. 

Mehli Mehta is a music school in the heart of the city, offering piano and string tuitions to both kids and adults. It all began 16 years ago, in honor of conductor and violinist, Mehli Mehta.  They had a desire to promote western classical music, and so it all began...  The foundation has been growing rapidly.  There are now  21 teachers, 564 students and over 1400 students on the waitlist!!!  Apart from private lessons, they also offer something called ‘Discover Music.’  As the name suggests, this is a group class which introduces music to children as young as 2 yrs old!  Other activities include choir (which i’ll talk more about in my next blog).

Hanging out with 2 of the teachers

I’ll perhaps just blog about July in this post and fill you in about August a bit later.  During the weekdays, I have been mainly teaching privately.  In the mornings, I taught a variety of adult students, ranging from 16-70, who were all mainly of the intermediate level, with a couple advanced students.  Most of them had two lessons a week.  These morning lessons have been some of my favorite as the students have been very receptive and responding quickly.  The use of arm weight has been a common focus in lessons as many students tend to solely focus on finger action, rather than the use of the arm and or the whole body.

Delicious Parsi meal at the Foundation

One highlight for me has been teaching this one student who could play music like Bach Prelude in C (Book 1), but had nearly no knowledge of theory (not even being able to identify/write basic crochet beats or rest!)  Needless to say, i was a bit shocked!  But in this past month, we mainly worked on theory together, and by the end of it, she was transposing and analyzing, and composing different harmonies (even using Augmented 6 chords!).  

After lunch, from about 2-8, I move onto younger students, of whom are mostly beginners.  Most of the kids have been very well behaved, with of course a few who struggle to sit still, but have been nonetheless, very enjoyable to teach.  The main things I have been working on with almost all the children have been note recognition (or sight reading).  Most of the kids here can play tunes, but have a lot of trouble in reading music.  Many of them have relied on phrases, such as ‘F-A-C-E’ or ‘All Cows Eat Grass’ to identify notes.  As a result, it takes them a very long time to read a new piece of music.  So flash cards and note-finding games have been readily implemented in the lessons.  Another repeated topic has been the use of the body/hand, which is perhaps an universal problem, especially for beginners.  Kids prefer to swing their feet, rather than having them flat on the stool/ground; flat fingers; low wrist, etc.  These common issues led me to lead several workshops.

Jam'n with the kids

All workshops happened over the weekend.  Over the course of the month, I had 10 workshops: 4 for teachers, 2 for adults and 4 for kids (two for 6-9, and two for 10-14).  With the teachers, we touched on the basics of posture, technique (rhythm, phrasing, scales), sight reading and musical form.  I will just highlight one workshop on sight reading.  Sight reading seems to be quite the abandoned field here, and it was great to see the teachers become excited about sight reading.  Some stayed for over half an hour at the end of the workshop to sight read duets with each other!  The two adult workshops were on the body and musical form.  And finally, with the kids, we again touched on the subject of posture and learning about different musical concepts (tempo, pitch, timbre, articulation and instrumentation) through Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals.’

 Apart from teaching and workshops, i assisted in a few Discover Music classes and in my ‘spare time’, I did my best in squeezing as many practice hours as i could for my July recital.  It was a bit stressful as it was difficult to find time to practice on top of the teaching and planning.  But the recital went very well and it was nice to see current WAMers, Ronald and Hannah and past WAMer Ryan!  Now i’m preparing for my next recital which will be in a couple weeks (eeks!).

One last thing, apart from piano work, i’ve been working with some of the violin teachers, observing violin lessons, and assisting in the violin ensemble class (it’s been 6 years since i seriously played the violin, so that’s been rather interesting).  It’s been good fun playing the good ol’ pachelbel canon and other folky tunes.

Mumbai by night

July has been busy but August has been even crazier.  I’ll post more soon.  Take care!

Ciao ciao,

Charis x

Under the Indian Sun :)

Based in Gurgaon in southern Delhi, along with fellow WAMer Alice, I’ve been assigned to help at the Performer’s Collective, run by the very welcoming and helpful Jack (who, despite his name, is Indian).  The staff at the Performer’s Collective have been extremely hospitable and friendly and made the transition from England to India for us as easy as possible.  

We were lucky enough to be given time to get to find our feet and get to grips with life here in India before starting our teaching. There were many things for us to have to adapt to – not least the sometimes non-existent water and electricity in our flat, the living room with not one stick of furniture, the ‘friendly’ resident geckoes, the downright ugly resident cockroaches and the initial lack of a cooker.  And despite taking great care with food hygiene, we’ve been ill on several occasions.  But balanced against the sheer vibrancy of Delhi, the friendliness of nearly everyone we’ve met, and the amazing experiences which seem to happen on a daily basis, I am so, so very lucky and happy to be here!

The Performer’s Collective has many contacts on the Delhi music scene, and Jack has ensured that we have been introduced to as much of this as possible.  We’ve met and exchanged ideas with some of the top guitarists in India and been taken to some of the big jazz clubs in Delhi. We’ve even had our photo in the ‘Times of India’.  However, our main focus at the Performer’s Collective is to teach on a, predominantly, one-on-one basis.  

Teaching these lessons and getting to know individual students has been an enlightening process.  People choose to have lessons for a variety of reasons and it’s been interesting to see how a different approach needs to be taken for each individual.  I have, for example, one student with mild learning disabilities who responds well to being given very direct instructions.  Mechanics of piano theory come more easily to her than the concept of musicality and thus she enjoys playing scales and finds it comical to be interrupted every time she plays an odd fingering or dud note.  In fact, the more defined the interruption, the funnier she finds it!  

 

The children are generally very responsive to what I’ve got to tell them and need a lot of basic technique advice – hand positioning / not jerking when putting the thumb under etc...  simple techniques which are generally learnt earlier on in Europe.  A lot of students have lessons with another teacher and then extra lessons with me so I spend a short time providing suggestions for their pieces (which often lack any sort of dynamics or individuality) and the majority of time on sight reading, aural exercises and rhythmic games in the hope that they might continue after I leave and so develop a stronger and more independent general musical awareness.  Most students insist that their sight reading skills are atrocious and they probably need to overcome a psychological barrier before they can improve.

I also try to stress the importance of maintaining a steady pulse and developing rhythmic comprehension as a lot of students prioritise working out the notes.  Thinking about fingerings, the key and thus the scalic progressions should combine with strength in terms of rhythmic interpretation to provide a successful strategy for sight reading.  However, one of my students summed up what seems to be a general feeling over here - when I asked what she would do in the exam in the minute she would be given before the sight reading test she replied: ‘I’ll get a pencil and write on all the note names’... I’ll be trying to do something about this!

We are now in touch with Music Basti, a local NGO which has 3 orphanages in Delhi for children from the streets.  It uses music and the arts as a basis for teaching and helping these children, who have often experienced substance and sexual abuse.  We are about to start regular workshops with the boys’ orphanage and have already begun at one of the girls’ orphanages. The girls here are very affectionate and appreciate new company and whilst they were timid at the beginning of the first workshop, a few silly games and tricks later and the chorus was a lot stronger.  Providing structure through repeating some of the songs and games and becoming a familiar face over the coming weeks will hopefully give them even more confidence to join in.  We were informed that, for some of the children, even sitting down and listening was an achievement and I hope that with some gentle encouragement we will bring some of the shyer ones out of themselves and give them something meaningful to enjoy through the medium of song.  Music is a great way to express oneself and just teaching a few songs and games could really help these kids who don’t have much else to distract them from the harsh realities of life.  

Local schools have also shown interest in us and we’ve been invited to run some workshops for groups of 10 year olds – where we will be wired up so that we can teach big groups of between 90 and 180 students! I am currently spending quite a bit of time planning the content of these workshops, and though at the moment it sounds nerve-wracking, I’m hopeful that it will turn out to be great fun too! 

Last week I went with WAMers Alice and Gabriel to meet Parimal, who studied Sitar under Ravi Shankar for 40 years.  Unfortunately, Delhi belly had struck again, and I spent a lot of the journey throwing up.  However, Parimal looked after us very well and we jammed Indian styyyle.  It was great!                                                                               

Akshardam temple - biggest Hindu temple in the world

We have also been able to do a bit of sight-seeing, including a trip to the beautiful Taj Mahal and a wonderful weekend in Jaipur, where we travelled to a hilltop fort by elephant and had the most fantastic views of the surrounding countryside.  Travel here is different– we went by overnight bus, which we had been assured was an air-conditioned double-

decker, but it turned out that we were on the top deck which was in fact a glorified luggage rack!  But a surprisingly comfortable luggage rack ....

Back to work now, apart from one short tourist trip, we have a workshop planned for nearly every remaining day of our stay..... 

Jenny

xxx

Probably the most boring blog you will ever read. We will try to make the next one "fun".

We finally have regular internet access... let the blogging commence:

This is Viktor and Grace, based in Kolkata.

Our schedule

We have a busy schedule, working six days a week at three schools in Calcutta and Salt Lake – Calcutta School of Music, Dolna Day School and C4 School of Music. Grace works mostly at CSM, with one day at C4 and some morning and evening classes at Dolna. She helps with singing, recorder, violin, drums and piano. Viktor is primarily involved in piano and music theory, mostly at CSM and C4, with some sessions at Dolna.

Our Free Fridays© are usually spent finding shopping centres and markets, and for Grace, being distracted by sparkly things and spending too much money on clothes. (- That’s really true! says Viktor.)

Impressions about students and teaching

We have had a very warm welcome in Kolkata, and are being extremely well looked after by all the teaching staff. We have lovely, safe accommodation in Dolna School, with food provided for us every day. If we have any need for medication or doctor’s appointments, we get all the support we need.

Our pupils are enthusiastic and respectful – they are attentive and eager to make the most of every lesson. Ages and standards are hugely varied, and although some of the younger ones don’t have much of a practice timetable (!), many of the older pupils practice every day.

The kids are very affectionate, and we have been given drawings and sweets on many occasions!

How to practice:  

The students need an increased awareness of different practice techniques, e.g. hands separately, varied articulation (staccato, legato) and rhythms (dotted, triplets), slow practice, and practising select passages rather than playing through the whole piece.

Breakdown of rhythms:

The rhythmic relation of one note to another, the function of a dotted note and the ‘pulse’ of the music are some aspects of rhythm which can be problematic – i.e., the maths behind the music.

A metronome beating the smallest rhythmic value of the piece usually helps with the subdivision of note values. We are hoping to take a session for younger children to help with both the understanding of note values and a more general concept of ‘pulse’.

Playing from memory:

It is fashionable to play piano music from memory very quickly, even in the early stages of learning a piece. This can result in mistakes being ‘learnt’ into the music (of which they are unaware), and a lack of ability to read music fluently (due to lack of reading the written score while playing).

Pedalling and hand position:

We’ve noticed in students that the pedal is often lifted too late or too early, affecting clarity and continuity in the music. We are aiming to make students more aware of the effect on the actual sound produced through different pedalling techniques.

As with any young students, there are many dipping wrists and flat fingers...

Musical genres and styles:

Lack of generic distinction is particularly evident in Baroque music, where appropriate articulation is often missing or understated. This is partly because the student may not have broken the music down into phrases, sub-phrases, etc.

We are planning several workshops in which we will help the students to aurally distinguish the features of different genres, and to reflect this in their playing. (Hopefully, by using syllabus repertoire, we can incorporate some practice techniques which will be immediately useful to them!).

Violin:

A brief note on violin technique from Grace – the most common left-hand technique here is to hold the neck of the violin in the curve between the thumb and first finger (i.e., the thumb is right round the side of the neck rather than underneath it). I am not used to this technique, and feel it is quite restrictive – it effectively shortens your fingers (!) and can make fourth-finger tuning and shifting more difficult. I’ve brought this up with the teachers, and it seems that the only widely available violin tutor book recommends this position. I have suggested a more flexible hand position for beginners, but many of the students have been practising this hold for several years and I don’t feel I should meddle with it...

One other small point is that some violin students hold the bow very high up on the wood which lessens their control over it and can cause excessive tilting. I’ve suggested that more of the grip should be focused on the base of the bow - but as with left-hand position, I feel that in only two months I should probably just make suggestions rather than try to enforce new techniques...

We realise that this is a very heavy blog and heartily apologise. We promise our next entry will be less poncy and boring.

On a less serious note, recent highlights include:

·         Viktor being tagged in photo on Facebook as an Indian girl (- It’s because of his beautiful swooshy hair, says Grace).

·         Grace getting biting ants in her knickers.

·         Drinking Chai for two rupees at the street corner.

Viktor and Grace

xx

Who knows what a 'Pirate' is....?

Hi Hannah here….so, here’s an update on how everything is going in Mumbai…

     In my last blog I was saying (complaining) that I haven’t been given a timetable. Well now I have been given a full timetable which includes 2 full days of keyboard teaching, 1 day of classroom music with Grades 1 and 2 and 2 days of kindergarten so it's all go.

    The keyboard classes are pretty challenging as we have lots of children crammed into a small room with dodgy electrics and a building site outside the (open) window, but I am working in tandem with the current keyboard teacher and getting the chance to share ideas with him which is good.  My main focus is to improve their posture as many of them are playing well and musically but with terrible technique, using only their first finger in some cases. Last week I gave them all a drilling on hand position and this week they have practiced and improved loads which is really rewarding. I wish my students in London would work that hard! The school has also asked me to write a keyboard syllabus which I am working hard on;  it’s good to know that I will be providing a tangible resource which can be used in the future.

     The Grade 1’s and 2’s are doing food as a topic so I have been teaching fun action songs about ‘cauliflowers fluffy’ and so on. They also, unfortunately, LOVE the ‘Pirate song’ which I stupidly taught them in the first class, and now have to sing every lesson. The fact that they all seem to think pirates drive airplanes (my English accent can be quite confusing) doesn’t seem to matter. Kindergarten are coming along brilliantly, the kids now know exactly what I want them do without me even having to ask them! Their topic this month is farming and food which is loads of fun, and they are now picking up new songs much quicker than they were a month ago – very satisfying. It’s nice that they are getting into a routine and are now used to me, walking into a classroom so cries of ‘Good Moooooorning Hannah Auntie’ is a very nice thing.

  Next week I am also going to run a few workshops for the school teachers and even have plans for a staff choir! It’s nice that the teachers are so enthusiastic and receptive to music, it’s just a shame that they don’t have a permanent music teacher all year.

    As well as working at our schools, Ronald and I have been running workshops for a fantastic charitable organization called Muktangen. This organization, run by a couple called Sunil and Liz Mehta,  provides education for the disadvantaged children of central Mumbai through a network of eight schools in various locations around the area of Parel. As well as providing education for children, they also help women from the local community to train as teachers and support them through professional development projects.  They have a great choir which was chosen to perform at the prestigious National Center for Performance Arts,  a music journey which was filmed for a Channel 4 documentary entitled ’From Slums to Stage’. Check them out at www.muktanganedu.org.

Muktangen workshop

Our day of music workshops was really fun and included cowboy warm-ups, a cool Algerian song, the Pirate Song and clapping games. In the break Ronald also used the opportunity to inform the children where exactly Scotland is (of course they had never heard of it and will probably never hear of it ever again) and that Scotland was ‘best’! As if. The kids were an absolute delight to teach, well behaved, enthusiastic and very good singers. After eight 45 min workshops we were exhausted but very happy with how the day had gone. We will be doing another two full days there before we leave which is great.

"Scotland best!"

     Our folk jam with Aditya, the local violin teacher, is still going strong  and I am still playing with Ayush, the Nepalese singer/songwriter dude. He has invited Ronald and I to participate in some music workshops he runs called ‘Dharavi Rocks’, which  involves children from Dharavi, the slum made famous by the film Slumdog Millionaire. These children, who work as rag pickers on the city dumps, bring bottles and tubs that they have found during their day to the workshops and Ayush leads them in a makeshift percussion band! We will be going along on Wednesday with our instruments ready to jam along. They are having a big fundraising concert on the 25^th, something we can hopefully contribute to.

Folk music with Aditya

So, all in all lots of good musical things happening!

Delhi Times

 Delhi has certainly lived up to its reputation as an exciting and busy city, and we have found plenty of opportunities to become involved with music through our teaching and through the friends we have made at the school - the Performers Collective in Gurgaon.

 

The students I am teaching are all enthusiastic and hardworking, although they are often very busy with school work which, unfortunately, takes priority over practice. I am teaching a range of abilities from beginners to post-grade 8, and have quickly discovered the advantages of planning lessons well in advance! New admissions are steadily being added to our timetable, and we plan to hold a performance workshop towards the end of our stay in order to showcase the work we have done with the students.

 

I have two students preparing for exams in November, a Grade 5 ABRSM candidate and a Grade 2 TrinityGuildhall candidate. Both have worked with me to improve their sightreading (which is a common theme running throughout all of my students) as their teachers tend to focus on the preparation of pieces and scales, leaving the sightreading and ear tests to the pupil to take care of. Technique and finger strength is also something which I have begun to address, particularly with those students who have moved onto learning the piano from the keyboard. The keyboard is a very popular instrument to learn in India, and is more readily available (and cheaper I suppose) for students to obtain, but the current syllabus doesn't teach left-hand stamina at all, and general posture is something which has to be re-learnt when shifting to the piano. Fortunately, everyone is very quick on the uptake here, and the improvements in  one-lesson can be very inspiring. Often, the students just need an idea to help them interpret the music so that it isn't merely a blur of black dots on a white page, but instead becomes a melody with interesting harmony that can be interpreted in several different ways.

 

I have been working with the main piano teacher in the school to develop her own repertoire and to introduce her to different ideas with regard to teaching a sense of musicality alongside technique. She has been very eager to take on several suggestions, but is currently run off her feet with teaching six days a week. A second piano teacher is due to arrive in September which should relieve her workload. The 40-minute time slots per lesson pass very quickly, and when students are late it can be difficult to cover much with them - especially when they haven't managed any practice that week due to academic pressures.  

 

Aside from our teaching, Jenny and I have begun to work with an NGO based in Delhi called Music Basti, for whom we have perfomed a workshop at a girls' orphanage in Kashmere Gate. We hope to work in a boys' home near Qutab Minar, and will most likely begin our work there in the coming week. We have also had the opportunity to see several Indian bands perform locally, my favourite so far was Hari and Sukhmani with their fusion of traditional Punjab folk song with English lyrics and RnB beats. You can hear some of their stuff here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6cH8cJwXwA&feature=related

 

And finally, Jenny and I have also featured in the Delhi Times under the caption 'Music Mad'... how fitting!

 

Alice Beckwith

Eggs, Bread & Van Halen

Right, it’s blog time again.

This last week has been an interesting one; new people, new places and something that almost resembled a Western breakfast. Hurrah!

So, last Monday, at some obscure hour of the morning, I set off with Abraham on a 3-hour drive (thankfully, not on the motorbike) to a place called Kottayam. The town itself isn’t much to look at but just a few kilometers to the West there are idyllic backwaters surrounded by paddy fields and extensive rubber plantations. It’s pretty nice.

The purpose of our trip was to visit Abraham’s latest project, the newly established Asian Christian College of Music. It’s situated next door to the India Baptist Theological Seminary, which was set up back in 2000 by Dr. Kunjumon Chacko, a world-renowned preacher of Christian teachings. With some help from the Bluefield College in Virginia, USA, he has acquired the necessary funding to turn a presently vacant building into a training centre for aspiring Church musicians. Abraham has been employed as Chief Executive and needs me to help him construct a syllabus for the new BMus course, which will focus primarily on performance. It’s a work in progress but will hopefully be finished by the end of this month!

ACCM

I spent the rest of the week deliberating over the content of the syllabus, but also managed to find time to do some sightseeing. The trip to Alleppey (which Lonely Planet describes as ‘Venice-like’) was fairly uneventful but I will always have fond memories of travelling by boat through picturesque backwaters to a soundtrack of Van Halen and Bruno Mars (courtesy of Azo, my travelling companion that day). I also decided to take the bus to Kumarakom Bird Sanctuary, where I found plenty of sanctuary, but a distinct lack of bird. That said, it turned out to be a very pleasant walk.  

Oh, and the breakfast gets a paragraph for itself; eggs, bread and even some jam. Heaven.

On Saturday, it was back to the kids at CDMS and their fear of THE THING. The ‘thing’ I refer to is, in fact, sight-reading, which, for the majority of students, forms the most difficult part of their musical education at the school. Many of them see it as an impossible feat and fail to proceed beyond the first bar, so I am enforcing a strict daily practice routine that ends with (yep, you guessed it) a few minutes of sight-reading. Whether they do it, of course, is another matter, but I live in hope.

Next weekend, I will be giving a workshop on piano performance to all 90 of the exam students who may, or may not, fit into the same classroom. In addition, I’ll attempt to provide them with an introduction to jazz, as the majority of pupils (and indeed, most of the country) are unfamiliar with the concept. I also have plans to collectively write a blues tune, which cannot fail to be a success. No wrong notes in jazz, right?!

Slightly breathless at present due to the unfortunate discovery of a relatively large beetle patrolling the surface of the desk at which I am sat. Boots Insect Repellent does a great job of repelling ‘biting insects’, though the label fails to explain that in doing so, it will attract everything else.

I think it’s time to re-charge the ‘bat’.

The 'Bat'

Next update coming soon!

Alex

One Moose, Two Meese.

Namaste!

Alex here. I’m a third year BMus student at the University of Edinburgh and am currently teaching at the CDMS music school in Trivandrum, Kerala (‘Coconut Land’).

Firstly, I would like to list some recent observations:

1. Indian traffic laws are yet to be established.
2. Eating with your hands is harder than it looks.
3. A ‘vada’ may look, and feel like, but is not a doughnut.
4. Everything takes at least 3 days to dry (including my guidebook).
5. Curry for breakfast is an acquired taste.
6. I saw an elephant outside the bank last Tuesday.

Now, back to teaching.

There is an army of students at CDMS – somewhere in the region of 1000. Most of them study Western Keyboard (the whole one-man-band thing with drums, bass, horn section and strings on one instrument) and about 150 study Classical Piano, with 90 entered for ABRSM exams in October. The school is open every day (!) and runs morning sessions, which are usually pretty quiet, and evening sessions for exam students after school. Most days, I arrive with my eyes full of dust at 3pm on the back of Abraham’s (one of the piano teachers) motorbike and offer one-to-one tuition for exam students until about 8pm.

It’s going well so far but I often forgot which students I’ve already seen so have, embarrassingly, managed to introduce myself to many of them at least twice. But I’m sure they don’t mind.  

Now, the teachers at CDMS are facing a bit of a dilemma. Many of the students studying Classical Piano would far prefer to be learning the Keyboard, as for one, it’s seen as a pretty ‘cool’ instrument in India, and  also puts at the performer's disposal a vast number of different instrument samples that can be played alongside pre-recorded accompaniments in a variety of styles. However, they end up studying Classical Piano because unlike the Keyboard, ABRSM offers an exam at the end of it, which gives successful candidates an additional qualification that could set them apart from other potential employees at a job interview. Understandable, but unfortunate.

The kids are a pleasure to teach and practice hard though for many, a new approach to practice may have to be adopted. One of the main problems that I have found is with fingering, as many of the kids are left to their own devices when learning a piece and proceed to invent a completely different fingering to the one written in their part. As a result, they are not in control of the dynamics, articulation or phrasing, which are key to achieving high marks in the exam. Another big problem is the fact that many of the kids cannot see past the notes on the page. To help them with this, I have come up with many (often absurd) examples of imagery and emotion to illustrate the music and open their minds to new ideas. It seems to be working and I now have my students living by the motto that ‘Every piece of music tells a story’. Well, it’s true.

I have also led a couple of aural workshops for the exam students (about 30-40 in each session) where we looked through the ABRSM tests before I gave everyone a chance to try them out individually. To break it up a bit, I incorporated lots of silly songs and games into the classes such as ‘Rhythm Detective’ (where the ‘Rhythm Detective’ has to identify the ‘Rhythm Criminal’ who is clapping and occasionally changing a rhythm that everyone else is copying) and ‘The Crazy Moose Song’ (they had no idea what a moose was so the whole thing was hilarious). I've got workshops on piano performance, jazz & blues and duets planned for next weekend, after which I will be going to the Asian Christian College of Music in Kottayam to give the teachers some advice on the BMus course that they will be running next year. I’ll let you know how it all goes!

The 'Crazy Moose'!

‘Praise him with a massive bass thumping at your chest’. Who knew that the Church held rock concerts? I certainly didn’t. This quote was taken from the opening slide of a PowerPoint presentation put together by the lovely people at Abraham’s Church. He provides all the music for the service using a Korg Pa50, and upon hearing a sample of his material, I decided to go along and see what it was all about. Turns out that every song is sung to the booming accompaniment of an 80’s synth-pop backing track, performed live by Abraham. I was blown away (although not literally, as the fan was broken).

Abraham getting his groove on in Church

My Indian cinema experience last Monday was an interesting one. I decided to see Harry Potter and found myself surrounded by a hoard of applauding lunatics that erupted whenever anything remotely positive happened to Team Potter. There were also occasional shouts of encouragement to urge on various characters during the on-screen battles and, of course, huge celebrations when the good guys won. And probably tears when they didn’t. All in all, very entertaining.

Also, the Pepsi here has recently been contaminated with some sort of disease, so I’ve been told not to drink it. On a more positive note, I have a rechargeable mosquito-hitting bat.

That’s all for now!

Alex