5.9.07

Waste Yaar




On Sunday some friends and I wandered up to the India Now festival on Regent Street. This was supposedly another event in this summer-long, London-India love-in (is that some sort of record? three hyphenated words in a row!) that's seen South Asian dance in Trafalgar Square and Nitin Sawhney scoring a silent Bollywood movie last week. Largely the festival's been typified by fairly interesting, engaging - and most importantly - free events.

But this, to put it mildly, was WASTE. Regent Street was shut to traffic, and it was a perfect example of how London could be transformed into a cafe-culture style modern European city with tables and chairs spilling into the road and people, eating, drinking and chilling without being fumigated by traffic pollution or harrassed by buses, taxis and cars. That literally was the one of two highlights along with the above. The bag-pipe playing asian military band. Nuts. They were impressive too, if a little stiff and upright. It's a festival for god's sake, SMILE.

Beyond that there was not much else. There were three performance areas on street level, but you couldn't see what was going on (unless you were as tall as Amitabh) because everyone was crowded round. We were hungry, and this really got my wick, but there were no street food stalls. Only three Masala Zones where you had to queue for an hour to sit down and eat. So you have an Indian street festival, WITH NO STREET FOOD. Let's be clear here, food and street food, is utterly integral to India and Indian culture, and there was none of it. We ended up in Wagamamas, another friend told me they ate in Pret. Brilliant.

The Asian Network stage was hype with Bobby Friction and Noreen keeping the energy levels up - it reminded me of a back in the day Radio 1 road show - but the music was pretty average, with a succession of Jay Sean-look-a-likes, doing Jay Sean style syrupy R&B and hip hop, and bhangra. And Rishi Rich shouting out to his mum, and uncle so and so. You're obviously a nice young man who's close to your famo but it was a bit much, 'so schweet' like a kitsch Bollywood movie moment that make you gag.

All in all a waste event, that was a waste of my time. Red Ken, you might love multicultural London and celebrate it, but this was poor, embarrassingly so and India Tourism, with events like this, you're giving my homeland a bad name.

ps. Yaar = mate