By Rahul Desai

Music is an art that romanticizes the very concept of art. Its self-expression is more speculative than, say, plain writing, in the sense that there is maximum truth to its form when the words become an estimation of various truths. It is the only art where wishful lies sound more honest than crippling certainty, where sobering experience meets reckless projection, where the factual ordinariness of the present can freely mingle with fictitious frames of an anticipated future – and still feel like cohesive personal commentary, or scattered public discourse.

Sixty-year-old rock stars can sing about childhoods they might not have lived, and reclusive twenty-five-year-old vocalists can wax rhythmic about experiences way beyond their years. They can sing about urban isolation, withering consciences, grey clouds, lonely lampposts, oceans of problems and ultimate survival, all from within the cramped confines of four walls. They discover things by assuming them, and romanticize life even before it happens. It’s this creative foolishness that defines artists.

Samyak, the young singer-songwriter of CityHaze, an obscure Mumbai-based band covered by Jaideep Varma in his Youtube documentary Par Ek Din, is a brooding manifestation of this hypothetical self-awareness. On one hand, he represents the angst of a generation that wants to be heard amidst all the noise. He rants, in a deadpan voice, about lofty things like hypocrisy and originality and societal bigotry. His arrogance is a finely honed act of self-defence. But in one scene, while he washes cups with what could well have been tears he never sheds, he talks about validation. Here, he is a child again. His frustrations are far more intimate. He doesn’t declare; he wonders. He wonders about why his parents would much rather crib about him finding a stable job than actually listen to his music. He wants them to appreciate not what he does but the way he does it. “Look mom, look at the songs, aren’t they interesting at least?” he pleads to nobody in particular, perhaps subconsciously channeling his band’s public shyness and fear of rejection into this rare moment of vulnerability. He could have well been addressing the audience he wishes they had.

It’s this precise sentiment that extends itself into the songs they record. It isn’t so much about the existential cynicism in the lyrics of Imaan, Nadiya and other tracks. It’s about Samyak’s voice. Just like awkward writers who can only communicate on paper, he becomes a singer of sudden serenity, and one who croons for – and not to – people. He sings for his struggling band of five cooped up together in a cramped suburban flat. He sings for aspiring filmmakers, actors and migrants living in alien cities under similar pressures. He sings for all our young insecurities – for my colleagues and I who spend boozy Friday evenings bemoaning the lack of quality film journalism in this country, for all our whining about having to be our own navigators. He sings for the version of me that wrote weird short fiction on my blog, more fulfilled by my growing storytelling skills than working towards a professional endgame. His voice feels like a lilting soundtrack to this India’s – my India’s – inconsistent, unruly grasp of ambition.

In a sense, we’re all hoping to be discovered, but simultaneously anxious at the possibility of being discovered. We’re hoping to get better at what we do, simultaneously cautious at the attention that might force us to lose our innocence. This fiery dichotomy of passion is what Varma’s documentary unwittingly explores. To his credit, he recognizes that some of Mumbai’s most hidden people are invariably those with the most compelling stories. Music is visibly his passion, too, which is why he seems to have made the film – impulsively, on the fly, perceptively – just like the band makes its music. He commentates on them in a sporadic podcast-style voiceover, just like they stiltedly talk about their unconventional techniques. His form of haphazard narration compliments the raw stage they’re at – not so much building up to their first live performance as introducing the kind of bottled-up humans who choose to spend a lifetime scoring, and elaborating on, our feelings.

Varma interrupts, asks, taunts, critiques and carves instead of simply observing. He more or less treats CityHaze as his song, a project in which he is fascinated by their youth just as they are endlessly fascinated by visions of a future they only write about. There’s not a shot of them outside their space, while they constantly explore failings beyond their door. For him, they are not taking a “risk” but merely doing what they should be doing – a bunch of kids too fresh to acknowledge that they are fortunate to be pursuing their dreams together, as an “album” and not a single, even if it’s just a fleeting phase.

He captures their existence over four days at a definitive time he believes will hold the key to their destiny. A time when someone like a freewheeling Samyak is still not resentful of his colleagues’ necessity to hold down conventional day jobs; a time when WWE, and not Netflix, still captures their imagination; a time when their high is substantiated less by substances and more by messy riffs of collaborative thinking.

Most of us identify such a life phase in hindsight, oddly enough through a haze of melancholy and perhaps to the kind of introspective sounds CityHaze create. But Varma chooses to take up the rather mentor-ish, quasi-paternal responsibility of pinpointing this period even as it’s unfurling. It’s not always convincing, but neither are their processes and philosophies, which is perhaps what makes the union of maker and subject strangely organic.

At one point, the members scoff at the formulaic requirements of commercial record labels. In between, we see footage of them composing the title song, Par Ek Din. “Adding new instruments every ninety seconds?” one of them chuckles, mimicking an executive, before Varma cuts to the evolution of their song. A keyboard is introduced. Then, more guitars. The session gets even more crowded with each take, until Samyak’s lilting voice is barely identifiable. They’re trying it, disillusioned after a failed mall performance, without even knowing it. Slowly but surely, they’re resorting to a balance between dreams and reality, between vision and compromise.

band-haze

This sequence, in a nutshell, is why this documentary is more remarkable than it looks. It looks hopeful of its subjects because of, and not despite, their unremarkable nature. It looks tender because they’re on the cusp of losing their tenderness, like a soft voice finally cracking – for better or for worse. And maybe down the line, this 89-minute film will be a nostalgic reminder of the “imaan” they, and we, had once vividly fantasized about. And lost.

[An edited version of this article was published in The Hindu]