Posts Tagged ‘amritsar’

The Golden Temple is like nothing you have ever seen before and it will exceed all your highest expectations of a place that you have heard about all your life. This morning, we woke up after just 3 hours of sleep and headed out to see the Golden Temple and it was a calm that we hadn’t experienced in a long while :)

But lets start with why we went to Amritsar in the first place. The 6th edition of the Peace Festival was held this year in association with the South Asia Foundation and only when we finally (after a long stopover in Delhi) got to Amritsar did we realize the magnitude of the festival and the distinguished line up we were part of.

We were headlining the show that featured Sain Zahoor, Arif Lohar, The Sain Brothers - Goonga Sain and Mithu Sain - Goonga Sain gets his name because he has been deaf and dumb from birth and yet is a renowned percussionist!, and a group of Manganiyars from Rajasthan. This was a really wide sampler of Indian Folk music and it was our honour being a part of such a line up.

What was more impressive was that this is a peace festival trying to bring about peace between India and Pakistan, with performers from both sides of the border mingling on the same stage entertaining and singing songs and spreading the message of peace. In effect, we were representing the country in an initiative like this!

The show itself had a severely delayed start, but we must thank the students of Springdale School, Amritsar who kept our spirits up backstage, helped us with sourcing and assembling a drum kit (which was completely in shreds when we arrived!) and then for manning our stall and being the best sales people we could ever get!

The show itself was a short and energetic set which was lapped up with glee by the audience that braved the chilly Amritsar weather and made up for the lack of numbers with their voices! We loved performing to Amritsar and many promises have been made to ensure we go back there soon, lets hope all of those work out.

Much thanks to the organizers especially Mr. MK Raina and Mr. Prabhakaran who were hosts beyond compare for making our extremely short stay at Amritsar something we won’t forget in a long time.

After heading to the hotel at around 2 in the morning, we decided to wake up at 5 and go out to see the Golden Temple and boy are we glad we did that! we stayed at the temple for over 2 hours trying to soak in the ambience, and come to terms with the astounding beauty of that place! I’d recommend that *everyone* go visit the Golden Temple atleast once in their lifetime, its totally worth it!

After a very nice experience at the first location, we couldn’t wait to see what awaited us at location 2!

The whole crew and us packed up everything to go to location 2 which we were told would be a deserted railway station. Now don’t get me wrong .. but why would there be a deserted railway station in the middle of a HUGE film set in Panvel? all of us thought it was a sure shot prank (well .. atleast I did!) and that there was some prank being planned … but we went along nevertheless ..

What we saw when we reached there was quite unreal .. right there in the middle of nowhere were 4 train coaches and I mean real train coaches and a proper retro railway station which was fully customizable for a film crew depending on the shoot you want!! The train was just kept there mounted on some springs and the station was complete with the clock and a few stores on the side and everything! and the train itself was from ‘Lahore to Amritsar’!! and the station was marked as ‘Atari’, a station which is actually on the India Pakistan border!

Siva as usual was in his element and we decided it was time to start using the train and the station as a prop and enact popular train and railway station cliche’s. It started out with Siva being a politician who had just landed in a village and was doing the customary ‘Namaste’ to his entourage and moved on to a very popular scene down south in railway stations … the bunch of old men sitting by the railway tracks and drinking their coffee with a spoonful of conversation! but as you can see here … we had quite a tough time looking authentic on that one!! especially me … who can’t fake it to save my life!!

The most authentic one of the lot has to be Siva who sat in the train and decided to act like the ‘Pissed Off Old Man’ who was just throwing his attitude around! and he looked the part ;)

It was tons of fun with all of us rolling with laughter and we had some nice ideas for the shoot. Raghu was still doing some solo singing at the first location while the crew just began setting up here. So we were all set for a super shot 2.More about the shoot itself in a post to follow …