This weekend saw a 3-day music festival, “Rang De Basanti”, organized by Pankaj Kothari, who runs Sagar Caterers, which caters to almost the entire Marwari community in Bangalore. The festival featured vintage Hindi film hits rendered by “Golden Greats”, an orchestra from Mumbai, preceded by dinner by Sagar Caterers, as part of the Holi celebrations. No, neither of them has a website…I tried googling for both!

The venue was Gayatri Vihar at the Bangalore Palace grounds…the reason for this choice of venue was apparent to me when we attended with some friends on Sunday evening…there were around 4000 people present!

Sagar Caterers seemed up to the challenge of catering to this huge congregation and had set up a series of stalls, serving a quite amazing spread of food..to quote the words on our tickets (priced Rs.100), ” from mocktails-n-juice to chaat-n-dosa to pizza-n-pasta to soup-n-salad to roti-n-subji to rice-n-dal to mithai-n-fruit to cake-n-ice cream to paan-supari-n-hookah.” (I am not kidding, it was all there!) No, I never got to see the hookah…and the fairly indisciplined crowds made it quite difficult to get any food properly…but it was worth the experience of seeing how hot food could be provided to such a large number of people!

After dinner, we went to the shamiana as the music was beginning. This too was very well-organized, with seats allocated to everyone; indeed, as the evening progressed, bottles of mineral water were circulated freely.

Golden Greats, the orchestra from Mumbai, presented by Kaushik Kothari, was excellent. I am rather wary of less-than-perfect orchestras with not-quite-in-tune singers, so it was a tremendous relief to hear the clear voices of the singers and I settled down with the others to enjoy the hit Hindi film songs of yesteryear. The selections, too, were pretty good, and the audience was really happy. Several male and female singers (“in the unpretentious Baithak style”) gave us a lot of favourite vintage songs.

We left by 11.15 pm, but our friends say the evening went on till past 2 am (how they managed that with the 11.30 pm-shut-down-and-go-home rule that Bangalore has beats me!)… having enjoyed the music and received an education about mass catering!