"Is this where you guys...practice?"

My first meeting with the band made me realize two things

1) They had a serious lack of talent, but not ambition
2) I shouldn't rush into considering them for my write up

The second thing was because a day after my interview when I had returned to my city A--- Pablo started calling me almost every hour asking me when the interview would be published in my magazine ***. And twice I could distinctively hear Alex in the background saying "Dude ask him whether we would be paid for the interview."

I hadn't really mentioned that I wanted to cover a totally new band to the powers-that-be at the magazine, and I hadn't even see them play till now. I placated them by saying that I wanted to take pictures of them practicing before I gave my article to the magazine, and with a promise to come back a month later I requested them to leave me in peace.

When I returned to their city, they asked me to come late in the night to see them practice. This wasn't an odd request, most rock bands I have met prefer practicing from after hours to the waking hours. As arranged I went to Pablo's hostel room at 10 in the night. He was glad to see me and in way of greeting asked me, "Where is your digi-cam?"

I didn't want to disappoint the poor fellow by telling him that presently I had no desire to click their photographs, so I said, "Well I do have a cell phone that has a camera. I will click your photographs."

He was a bit surprised, "Will the magazine accept cell phone photographs? Look I can arrange a digital camera for you if you want to, I mean someone in the hostel must have it."

I came to the point, "Look, the photographs are not important, tonight I want to see you guys in action so that I can write a proper review."

Pablo promptly went out in search of his band members, we found Adi sleeping, Alex practicing, PC talking on the phone ("Practice? Right now? No one told me!" He said, "Well I am telling you now. Get ready." "Okay," he said, "Just give me five minutes to water my hair.") And then we found the drummer studying.

"Sorry yaar Pablo, the tests are just a week away, and it will be too much of a time waste...Can't we do it after the test?"

Pablo whispered something in his ears but I could easily make out words like 'magazine' and 'exposure' etc. The drummer reluctantly agreed.

"The problem is," Pablo said, "Our drummer is one of the toppers in class, and thus doesn't really devote much time to practice. He is good though, classic beat sense, impeccable timing."

I looked at my watch and saw that the whole gathering the band exercise had taken a good part of half an hour. Finally Broken Tooth was ready for practice. Alex said, "We'll have to borrow one guitar, the jack in mine isn't working."

This was a typical raw band, they had little equipment to call their own, but I liked the fact that they took the pain to arrange stuff. "So where is your practice room? In some hostel? In your hostel?"

"No, it's in the gymkhana building. We have a spare key to practice in the night." PC said.

The said building was located in the corner of a cricket ground which was surrounded by a fence. We walked to the main gate of the ground and I waited for someone to produce a key. Instead, Alex, PC and Adi slipped in their guitars from under the gate and started climbing through a hole in the fence.

"You see, we do have the key to the practice room but we are not given the key to the main gate. Because of some red tape etc."

The practice room was covered with dust and pigeon droppings. There were broken chairs, and speakers that looked pretty ancient. They were huge, but ancient.

"Is this where you guys...practice?" I asked them, looking around the accoustically bad and un-hospitable surroundings.

"Yeah," Pablo said, grinning from ear to ear, "It's a beauty, isn't it?"

"Tama drumkit! That's impressive." I said. There was a big Tama sticker on the bass drum, the high hat and crash cymbal didn't look much but the whole kit looked nice. And then I proceeded to check out the drum kit, being a bit of an amateur drummer myself.

It turned out that there were only two pieces of the drums that were Tama, the Bass drum and the floor Tom, the rest were local drums covered with skins bearing the markings of 'Abdul Wajih Band.'

Himanshu the drummer sat on the make shift stool behind and said, "There's a hole in the snare drum, someone messed it up."

Pablo started letting off a string of insults at loads of people who could fall in the catagory of 'someone', Adi ignored his tirade and said coolly, "Flip it over dude, use the other head."

A closer inspection of the crash cymbal looked like someone had taken a bite off it, or perhaps there were termites here with some heavy duty diet. The band took it's time tuning the guitars, while the vocalist tried to make himself useful but mostly got in the way of people, I sat at the edge of a wooden table and made notes on my spiral book.

After ear splitting feedbacks and a constant humming from the microphone (which was put up on a plastic stand that could not survive the mic's weight, I don't know what purpose it served) the band looked ready for practice.

"Right, what would you like to hear?" Pablo asked me confidently.

"What do you mean what would he like to hear?" Alex asked him, "We do only one song correctly."

Pablo hissed, "I am aware of that guitarist of mine...he would have said 'Anything' and we would have played our song...it's etiquette, or something."

I said, "It's okay guys, play whatever you are comfortable with."

And 'play' they did. With a four stick-check they started off with 'Rolling Stone's' Satisfaction.' At first I couldn't make out anything in the din because of the bad quality of the speakers, but when I distanced myself a bit from the players and went to the balcony, I heard the song clearly. And for a new band, they were playing the song (which was perhaps the only song they knew at that time) rather well. Satisfaction is a simple song, but its a high energy song, and with repeat playings they got better. I smiled, and realized that perhaps for my study I hadn't made a bad choice after all.

After the practice I asked them, "How do you guys co-ordinate? I mean when you can hardly hear yourself play, especially over the drums." Each one of them had a formula.

"I just lip read whatever Pablo is singing." Alex said.

"I follow Alex's hand positions on the fret board." Pablo said.

"I too, follow Alex." Adi said.

"I obviously play from the heart." PC said

"I count the beats in my mind for each cycle." Himanshu the drummer said, and then he added, "Can we wrap up now please? I have got to study loads."

Ah, well...so much for music theory.