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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Arts & Reviews |
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Feature |
So You Want to Be a DJ?
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| Inside Delhi’s DJ training industry |
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Published : 1 February 2012 |
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COURTESY AKBAR SAMI |
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| Akbar Sami, who rose to fame in 2000 with his remix album
Jalwa, is an inspiration to an entire generation of aspiring DJs.
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| A |
DUSTY TWILIGHT IS SETTLING IN GURGAON. Our rickshaw hits every possible pothole on the slip road as we pass rows of boxy shopping centres enticingly calling out to their weekend patrons, who have turned out in packs. Sunantha Laxmi and I plunge headlong into oncoming traffic, dodging a torrent of craters and cars. |
Earlier that evening I’d met Sunantha at Gurgaon’s packed Sahara Mall. Sporting a poker-straight bright blonde-orange bob, green pants and a laptop bag on her shoulder, she stood awkward and guarded behind an arrangement of large flowerpots that looked onto the lobby of the mall where families pushed children into playpens, couples surreptitiously convened at Café Coffee Day and late-evening shoppers began their escapades. The beginning of her workday marked the end of everyone else’s, and the guarded look she wore had become second nature—now 22, Sunantha has been a resident DJ at a local club since she was 19.
We head towards Megacity Mall, the location of the resto-bar Vapour at which Sunantha is a junior resident DJ. On the ride over she keeps up an incessant stream of chatter as I try hard to hold on to my seat. She tells me about the autowala who takes her to and from work for her ungodly 6 pm to 3 am night shift. In an area where skirmishes, drunken or sober, are regularly settled at gunpoint, it’s scary to think of this petite girl unarmed on the roads of Gurgaon.
| RAJ K RAJ / HT PHOTO / COURTESY JAZZY JOE |
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Once the resident DJ at the Taj Palace’s My Kind of Place,
Jazzy Joe now runs a DJ school in his house in Janakpuri. |
She’s unfazed. “Oh, he’s very reliable,” Sunantha says, pooh-poohing away my unwarranted, parent-like questioning. Given the drunk, testosterone-driven local men swarming inside and outside the bars, Laxmi—or DJ Sammy, as she calls herself—plays at, the autowala is among her few security measures.
Sunantha has little time for my misplaced concerns; in recent years she hasn’t had much communication with her own parents, after all. The news that their daughter didn’t want to continue down a “normal” trajectory—IAS officer or lawyer or engineer—didn’t sit very well with them: “There was a huge fight at home when I said I didn’t want to do the LLB degree I’d gotten admission into, in a university in Pune. I wanted to do something with music. I just didn’t know what. Plus, I had no formal education in it.”
The moment she broke the news that she had finally decided to turn the many afternoons spent DJing on cassette players at house parties into a serious career, her army-officer father put his foot down. “He said this wasn’t a career. There was no future. It was a terrible choice for women, with no scope to grow”—and in the end, the 18-year-old’s father gave her a typically cast-iron armed forces ultimatum: that he wouldn’t support her if she chose this path. And, in equally typical teenage rebellion, Sunantha moved out and into the house of an uncle who was both younger and cooler.
As we sip on iced tea before her worknight begins, Sunantha continues: “After a month of living there, I went back home, without telling anyone, to find a huge padlock on my door.” Her Bengali neighbour was the first to tell her that her father had retired. “‘How do you not know?’ she asked me, so surprised. My entire family had moved home to Kerala,” she says, her eyes welling up, “and no one had told me.”
Forced to come to terms with the consequences of her family-severing decision, Sunantha realised she would need a course in DJing in order to get a foothold in the industry. She answered an advert in the papers for a BPO job, which paid a rather generous  20,000. “After I’d put away some money, I started looking for courses and came upon Jazzy Joe’s and Spingurus’s websites. And just decided to call Jazzy Sir.”
She looks down at her cell phone—vibrating repeatedly—and says, “Fish! I need to run.” We laugh at her toned-down expletive as she pushes her petite frame past hefty male bodies milling around at the entrance of the mall. The slight Keralite seems completely at home with the rambunctious crowds.
“The last two clubs I played at had lots of uska reference ka party hais,” she says. “The crowds would ask me to play popular Jat songs like ‘Jat da chora’, and would threaten to call their ‘contacts’ if I didn’t have a song they wanted to hear.” Sunantha would snap back saying their fathers weren’t paying her, or would intentionally tear up the occasional napkin scribbled with a compliment. Once, she even slapped a guy who was fiddling with the console. “I just told him to F-off, I didn’t care who his contacts were!” Two years of dealing with the rowdiness of the clientele at Last Chance was enough to steel her nerves—but also left her hankering for something less conflict-ridden.
Vapour was the place she settled for—and is also where we’re soon sipping a mug of in-house microbrewed light beer. One of the few places that have opened in Gurgaon to cater to the satellite town’s more upmarket and genteel residents, Vapour’s rooftop offers diners mezze platters, a view of the glass-and-steel skyline and pints of freshly-brewed beer. It all ties neatly into Gurgaon’s desire to be more like Singapore and less like, well, a developing-too-quickly-for-its-own-good Haryanvi village. For Sunantha it fit like a glove.
She comes back to her story after slipping in a CD of pop hits from the 1990s to entertain the few tables with early-evening, post-work patrons. “You know, my first employers only wanted me because I was a girl, and they wanted some glamour in their club.” (A common grouse of many male DJs is that women are chosen over them and paid much more money.) Sunantha’s daily routine is to collect and archive digitally-available tracks for the rock ‘n’ roll and retro music she plays during the week. Weekends, on the other hand, are filled with mostly commercial playlists. “I’d love to play psychedelic music though,” she says wistfully. “Sometimes I just slip a track in here and there for 20 minutes, when it’s really late and no one notices!” I don’t have the heart to tell her that someone had noticed. That someone happened to be a journalist with a business daily, whose review certainly praised the microbrewery—but made a point to refer to the strange mix of trance being played at the resto-bar.
| W |
HEN SUNANTHA FIRST CALLED JAZZY in 2008, his initial reaction was cold, even disparaging. In India, where many a DJ school is run from a bedroom or a back alley, conjuring up visions of money-spinning, fly-by-night operations, the instructors claim they crush rather than encourage the aspirations of countless starry-eyed DJ-wannabes who come |
to them hungry for the glamour of a DJ’s life.
At Jazzy Joe’s academy, the first cut is made when you email Jazzy. An immediate and automatic response arrives in your inbox listing the “pros and cons” of a career in DJing. The upsides, you’re told, are “no work, all fun and play, money (DJs with little or no experience can earn anything from 5,000 to 20,000), celebrity status and travel.”
And the email goes on to attempt a few witty warnings. Listed under Downsides: “1. High risk factor - if you don’t update yourself regularly or have a distinct identity of your own, 2. Grind behind the glam - since partying is a weekend activity and everyone’s holiday is your workday, 3. “Lifestyle risk” of a job associated with alcohol, sleepless nights and drugs.”
“Can you hold your own?” ends the email, ominously.
It’s his duty, Jazzy says, to warn prospective students and tell them the “hard truth”.
“DJs today are treated like dogs,” Sunantha’s guru says dramatically. It wasn’t always thus: “Back in the nineties when I played at clubs, we were gods.”
Jazzy sits curled up on a chair in his cosy one-story Janakpuri house, the air heavy with the smell of lunchtime spices. I had expected to find a flamboyantly turned-out man. The image on the website’s homepage presents Jazzy in a shiny purple jacket and matching cap, calling out “So you wanna be a dj?” But the man in front of me, with thinning shoulder-length hair, knee-high Bermuda shorts—which I suspected were chequered boxers—and a dull grey sweatshirt, conveys little of the promised pomp.
As his sister and brother bustle in and out getting lunch ready, he shuffles around with a large pile of files to make space in the 5-foot-by-4-foot living room. “I’m taking care of my father’s paperwork, and the house is a mess. My entire family is also visiting,” he says apologetically. “He passed away a month ago, so I’m taking a break from the workshops.”
The modest, middle-class living room, complete with the ubiquitous brown and maroon furniture and plastic flowers, is nobody’s picture of a DJ’s studio, or even his home. It must show on my face as I look around—so Jazzy takes me to behind the house, to a vinyl-lined room cramped with enough complicated equipment to launch a spaceship, its walls covered with posters of music greats, including the mandatory Jamaican Rastafarian, LGBT stickers, and record covers of everyone from David Guetta to Aerthra Franklin. This is where Rajiv Kishore Sharma holds his workshops and spawns mini Jazzy Joes.
The son of an Indian Foreign Service officer, he grew up on the move: “Papa was a rolling stone and we rolled with him,” he said, with a slightly theatrical air. At the age of 17, he began running a fortnightly song request program at a small Indonesian radio station off his two-in-one, and a decade later Jazzy was the resident DJ at the Taj Palace’s My Kind of Place (MKOP), where he conceived of the very popular expat hip-hop nights on Fridays.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Sachin
27 February 2012
04:54 PM
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What a crappy article.Just wasted 20 minutes reading the whole thing in hope of finding something interesting.Read the first few paragraphs and then move to better things.
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