Music for weary rail commuters in Mumbai

Mumbai: For a city long known as the financial capital but culturally being at the bottom compared to cities like Shanghai and New York, a lead is being taken for the first time to carry music to public spaces, presently to railway stations, to help bring commuters out of their daily drudgery.

Where the only entertainment for the masses is watching television, this idea of moving to public places as an alternative stage for performance by the National Streets for Performing Arts (NSPA) is already creating an encouraging interaction between artistes and commuters. “The response is positive since commuters who initially spent a few minutes are now standing longer and listening to the musicians,” said Shrishti Iyer, Performance Co-ordinator, HelpYourNgo.com, under which the NSPA has been initiated.

In collaboration with the Western Railways, Mumbai Division, performances by artistes of all genres have begun at three railway stations across the Mumbai rail network at Churchgate, Bandra and Borivali where the strains of a guitar or mridangam are already creating a Pied Piper effect.

“We are currently inviting musicians to auditions for performances in the month of November 2012,” said Iyer who told Gulf News that many commuters are asking them if they too could participate. “We want to make this a regular feature and extend it to parks and gardens.”

The brainwave behind this refreshing effort is NSPA founder Ajit Dayal, who remembers his childhood days of watching street performers in Mumbai and this tradition still continuing in London and Paris. He now wants to rekindle this in urban India, starting with Mumbai. To him, these performances brought “joy to the lives of millions as they go about their daily commute”.

At the same time, NSPA also aims to support the livelihoods of less privileged and independent performers across diverse genres. A one–hour schedule through the day on November 3 at Bandra station includes young musicians—Pratyul Joshi on acoustic guitar, Neeraj Arya, who has sung for two bands, Dakshinamurthy and Vishwanath Ramaswamy who will render Carnatic classical music and Dhammarakshit Randive’s contemporary Marathi folk music.

In this first phase, the NSPA which has been inviting Mumbai-based musicians across diverse genres to perform, is hoping to support traditional and folk art forms and those artists seeking a steady source of income. A railway station as a stage may offer little comfort to the performer during performance but NSPA artistes will be paid on a time-rate basis—Rs1,000 (Dh68.4) per hour for a single artist and Rs1,500 for a band of not more than three artistes.

This may be one small step in bringing back art for the people in Mumbai which has just 593 music performances in a year as against 15,000 in international cities — as stated in the World Cities Culture Report 2012. A senior Carnatic music teacher, Muthulakshmi Mami, advocates the need for the city to re-acquaint itself with art and for artists to open themselves up to diverse audiences. At the same time, she stresses that city spaces must become more hygienic and artist-friendly.