Smoke Veiled & Hippie Happy – Vagabundo Magazine

A confident accented voice calls out to me excitedly from behind a curtain, ‘Welcome to Haaampi my friend’, with an exaggerated ‘aaa’ I loathe the sound of! The hatred for the accent immediately dissolves on seeing a friendly young face in front of my camera lens! I instantly know that this is going to be a fun afternoon. After a tentative five minutes at the door, I find myself sprawled on the shop floor focussing with my camera on the an array of Indian and International indigenous musical instruments. I look up briefly to gauge the surroundings – psychedelic paintings flake off the crumbling paint on the walls, graffiti of affable messages on peace and love, mushrooms in vibrant colours and the quintessential floor arrangement to sit and ‘jam’   – a jarring contrast to the 1000 year old stark temple outside for which the region is famous all over the world. The ambience transports me to somewhere far away from the historic town of Hampi in Karnataka.

Soon the accent drops, and Gali slowly but carefully unveils his story! He comes from a small village in North Karnataka where his parents still harbour the hope of an engineering career for him, education for which they painstakingly funded many years ago. Gali, on the other hand, is convinced that music will set him free and meet wonderful ‘foreign friends’ whose names he can’t recall but they all fall under a blurred group of ‘ that guy from Germany’, ‘that tattoo artiste from England’ and ‘the girl who is travelling to Cambodia next’!  Photographs with buddies and messages scribbled in a weathered diary are brought out and displayed enthusiastically. I have to admit that I am impressed at his ability to connect with such a variety of people. Our conversation veers onto the kind of instruments and their aboriginal roots. Gali is certainly talented enough to learn all of these and now perform with ease. We click and ofcourse it must be the harem pants and the ‘lone traveller’ tag, which gets me a generous invitation to ‘smoke up’ – just one joint, not much! I evade politely and continue practising my freshly acquired talent of playing the Vietnamese Dao Long.

“How about business?” I nudge him to get a more realistic and intimate perspective of his life. Regular meanderings to similar travel destinations like Dharamsala, Manali and Goa have gained him a tight camaraderie with Westerners who want to live the 70’s dream of lofty backpacking ideas to this seemingly mystical country. Amidst well practiced sessions of playing the jambe and the didgeridoo, he starts letting me into his real world! A world where Spanish, German and British friends are not spoken about with much gusto! Instead, he discusses the difficulty in getting access to learning about instruments, rebuke by parents, cop visits to check the shop for drugs and a more lucrative career long forgotten.

Friendships are short-lived but habits acquired from these nomadic friends are for life. The veil of smoke in front of him cannot hide the despondency about his future. Not that I have any intentions of social policing Gali and the travel scenario in general, but it occurs to me that a loss of identity has started to etch itself more clearly than the initial buoyant lure of limitless love of music. His tone and expression unravel the deep rift of survival versus subscription to a lifestyle that was not part of the plan when Gali was growing up! There are regular checks by the police, who are often bribed to maintain the business of mild drugs, which keeps the mood alive at the jams. Moreover rent for his meagre space, sourcing or making the instruments is not cheap and the success of the travel season defines the fate for the lean months.  Curbing his emotions, Gali cheerfully adds colour to the dismal picture – ‘ But it’s great to meet new people all the time & I have also recorded a CD’.

All I can do is leave with a judgement of his situation making a minute difference only by purchasing a small instrument for a colossal sum and becoming yet another picture of visitors on his wall! I also pick up the CD to remind me of many like him who get submerged in the valour of providing the sobriquets of ‘quaint’, ‘bizarre’ and ‘magical’ to India for better tourism. I hope that these lives of careless abandonment sustain and the hippie-happy people of India cultivate a better future for themselves!

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