SPRENG FEST 2010 BANGALORE – Inter IIT Indian Music Competition

Dedicated to charity - LIGHT FOR EDUCATION

Venues – Chodiah, Ambedkar, St. Johns or equivalent (will be booked by Monday)

Date – 25^th September 2010

Timings

6.30 to 7.00 – Registrations and Magic Show

7.00 to 7.30 – Inaugural Ceremonies comprising of

* Welcome Note

* Light For Education (solar lighing for rural children thro Selco run by

KGP graduate) and handing over cheque

* Launch of Outstanding Faculty Award initiated by Bangalore based

KGP Alumni

* Launch of IIT Alumni Club Bangalore

7.00 to 9.00 – Music Competition

9.00 to 9.15 – 11^th Hour tunes up

9.15 to 9.30 – Prize Distribution

9.30 to 10.30 – Western Music Performance by Eleventh Hour – all IIT Band

10.30 to 10.45 – Vote of Thanks

Rules

1. We expect all 7 IITs to put up teams
2. Each IIT will nominate one person as the Group Leader. Already identified

Shanti – Chennai

Ranjita – KGP

Vijaya – Mumbai

Shankar – Kanpur

We need to get names for Delhi, Roorke and Guwahati 27^th July 2010

3. Each band will be given 10 to 12 minutes to perform. 12 minutes x 7 = 84minutes + 6 switches x 5 minutes = 30 minutes Total 114 minutes. Band exceeding 12 minutes will be given negative marks. Within their stipulated time, band can perform any number of songs.
4. Music should be Indian and performance should have Vocals
5. Heavy Duty Classical Music not allowed.
6. Teams putting up full band on their own will be given bonus marks
7. The team with the largest band will get bonus marks (provided they play in synch!)
8. Professional Percussion / keyboard assistance will be provided for teams that can’t mobilize full band. Professionals will be available at venue on the same day a few hours for practice. Teams that want to avail Pro assistance should give the songs one week in advance.
9. Teams can also get non-Bangalore based alumni to augment their team
10. Children of Alumni are allowed to be a part of the band

Others

1. Booze obviously is out
2. Food Stalls will be there for people to buy food
3. We are looking at keeping Ticket price very low and are targeting at 500+ audience
4. Prizes will be awarded for No1. Band, No.2 Band, No1. Vocalist, No.2 Vocalist and Best Instrumentalist.
5. During breaks, we will have MC to entertain people with crowd games, etc. Thoughts?

Collectors Items: Vintage Video Recordings of TMS

Finally after years of effort and deliberating I'm able to retrieve two recordings of TMS performance, one in 96 Spring Fest and the other in 98 (I'd already left KGP by that time, so can't say exactly about the background of the event). I'd got the Spring Fest 96 program recorded but had lost the original VHS tape. Kanishka luckily had a copy of the recording and also a recording of the other show. I collected both thetapes from him last year but never could play on my 15 year old VCR. Finally I could clean the VCR head, play the tapes and more importantly convert the VHS indo DVD!! My project of more than a year has finally concluded successfully!! And wow, what a nice thing to see the recordings 13-14 years old. And the most interesting thing is that I'm just amazed by the quality of our shows back then. Many of us manage to do shows even now and I'll link all those recent recordings also to the TMS blog site. But you can yourselves make out we did better back then - and the reason may be very simple - we practised for 4-5 hours every night for a month for the shows and now we meet barely for a few hours once a week only a few times!!

I'll slowly upload the recordings of the 96-98 shows slowly to youtube. If you have links to other TMS shows please let me know. You toube already has some recent shows, but I'd like to get some old recordings too.

BTW, why don't you all invite all your juniors and seniors you know to this mailing list. I think if each of us get our own juniors we can surely get everyone till the recent batch!!

Happy musicing!! Watch out how you looked like more than a decade!!

Sudipto (96, RK)

The ultimate site for Hindi songs

I don't know if you're aware of this site called http://bollango.com. I'm just thrilled to get this site. I feel it's no doubt one of the best and most comprehensive sites for Hindi songs. You would just freak out once you see it. It has downloadable MP3 for a wide range of songs. The search engine is just awesome. It has songs by almost anyone you can think of. You can search for any combination, say songs written by Sahir, composed by R D Burman and sung by Kishore Kumar. That's an easy one. You may try for a song composed by Rahman and written by Rabindranath Tagore - well there are in fact two - Rahman's version of Jana Gana Mana and Ekla Chalo
Re (from the movie Subhas Chandra Bose).

Also it has a classification based in raagas. That's really cool.

Do you guys know of such an exhaustive site for English songs? I'd be interested to know sites that have good MP3 of the Rock-n-Roll, Jazz, Blues Age. My dad used to have a good collection of long play records of Harry Belafonte, Pat Boon, Nat King Cole, Elvis, Jim Reeves, Paul Robson, Pete Seger and many more. I grew up with these songs and hence still have a special feelings for them, though very few people listen to all these now-a-days!! Even I don't get good collections of these songs in any store in India. Though I'm against piracy, but then when the only place to get these songs is perhaps internet I can't help!! If you know of a really good site for listening and downloading English/Latino/Spanish/any Western songs please let us know!!

Thanks & Regards,
Sudipto