Under the full moon, orig­i­nally uploaded by anitab­ora.

Under a full moon night, on Kanakpura Road, we were treated to a melange of music and dance — from Hin­dus­tani clas­si­cal, to rock to death metal — every­thing was on the menu!

The dusk to dawn music con­cert, Bhoomi Jathre, was held at the Fire­flies Ashram, about 20 kilo­me­tres from the city on Sat­ur­day evening.

We almost didn’t get there. In fact, we were pos­si­bly headed towards Tamil Nadu accord­ing to one of our vehicle’s occu­pants. Our nav­i­ga­tor, who I shall call VD, nearly missed the non-descript turn to the ashram on Kanakpura Road.

VI, who was dri­ving his brand new sun­shine car, finally gave his vehi­cle some real exer­cise as we bumped over the bad vil­lage roads. Actu­ally, in some places there were no roads and VI went ouch, ouch as if he was phys­i­cally hurt. The poor thing — new cars do strange things to people.

We reached much after dusk, around 10.30 pm. The line-up included vio­lin­ists Mysore Nagaraj & Mysore Man­ju­nath, a Yak­sha­gana troupe from Udipi (which we missed) , Shiri Dance Com­pany and G. Ravi Kiran, a Car­natic vocal­ist. Then there was Konarak Reddy, Roberto Narain (who gave a rather impres­sive solo drum per­for­mance) and Vasund­hara Das who joined in for their last number.

The stage was set under a beau­ti­ful peepal (or banyan?) tree — quite appro­pri­ate as the theme for this year’s Jathre was the Tree God. The stalls around the venue kept us nour­ished through the night. The momos ran out quickly and we had to resort to other good­ies like kebabs and cake.

Bumped into quite a few peo­ple includ­ing Rocky and Pallavi who were there with their biker gang. Jace appar­ently was up there near the stage click­ing pic­tures, but I didn’t catch sight of him.

It was a rather beau­ti­ful night. The mos­qui­toes descended upon us with vengeance, but we smart peo­ple had gone pre­pared with mos­quito coils and chad­dars. Sleep­ing bags, pil­lows and cush­ions are how­ever rec­om­mended, since the stone steps do tend to affect all your body parts after pro­longed exposure.

We man­aged to stay awake till 5.00 in the morning.

At about that time, a band called Myn­d­snare came onto stage. I had no idea what we were in for. Sud­denly, the lead vocal­ist screamed into the mike and such sounds emanated from him, that I swear, I have not been able to sleep ever since. He was amaz­ing, I think I actu­ally watched open mouthed for a while, com­pletely entranced at his performance.

Not hav­ing had much expo­sure to death metal I realised why they call it death metal :) I won­der if the fella’s par­ents get any sleep at home. In no time, the three mem­ber band (includ­ing a woman who drummed as furi­ously as afore­men­tioned death metal singer sang) man­aged to wake up every­one includ­ing the ones who had set­tled in com­fort­ably for the night.

Myn­d­snare had done their job. There was another band that was to fol­low — called Yell-o. But the name itself sounded slightly scary so at about 5.30 am we decided to call it a night (or a morn­ing, to be more exact!).