Dandiya nights

Navratri in Mumbai and Gujarat is a high voltage event with livewire performances and New Age entertainment, discovers Abhilasha Ojha

Laser beams that write across the night sky, high wattage music, pulsating crowds and months of preparation — you might be forgiven for thinking that a Madonna show is in the offing, but for nine days and nine nights Falguni Pathak will put the Virgin star to shame with her popularity in at least Mumbai and Gujarat. Not for nothing is she labelled the Queen of Dandiya with a fan following of hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic supporters who will go to any lengths, and pay any price, to see her perform.

 

Slowly, if surely, Navratri — the festival of nine nights in which the mother goddess comes home to visit — has metamorphosed into at least west India’s most glitzy festival, a social occasion so huge, the two states start preparations months ahead of the event. Companies set aside a part of their budget to associate with the celebrations, when on the nine nights, performers will belt out high-velocity dandiya rock ’n’ roll, where audiences will actually dance to the beats in time-honoured and community-sanctioned tradition.

As Falguni Pathak, not unlike something Michael Jackson might have dreamt up, descends on the stage in Goregaon in a hot-air balloon, as Devang Patel tots up his fees-by-the-hour, one cannot help but wonder how the low-key and homely festival turned New Age. Forty-something Devendra Joshi might have the right answer but the event manager has been having a hectic week, staple meals replaced by a diet of biscuits on the run. For a month now, he’s been sleeping in snatches, even these interrupted by late-night meetings with top-notch multinational and other corporate honchos and celebrities from the film and television industry. Priyanka Chopra, Harman Baweja and Neil Nitin Mukesh, slated to make appearances at Sankalp this year, can’t resist the instant connect that the festival offers them with audiences for their forthcoming films. Marketing executives from Joshi’s team have been making PowerPoint presentations to companies keen on tying up with Joshi’s 16-year-old company, Sankalp. At the time of writing, sources tell us that jewellery power brand Geetanjali Jewellers is ready to shell out a substantial sum as one of the main sponsors for Sankalp’s dandiya event 2009. Multiply Sankalp into hundreds of similar event companies — and events — and you have a huge catchment area feeding into the dandiya frenzy.

Joshi’s Sankalp and its many clones specialise in what Joshi calls “festival events”. His nine-nights dandiya shows see a total of 2.5 lakh footfalls — this year to be staged at Goregaon Sports Complex and likely to cost a mammoth Rs 3 crore, not that Joshi will spend out of his own pocket. The company has roped in Bollywood choreographer Remo D’Souza for the show and is investing heavily on a special dance floor spread over 70,000 sq ft and able to accommodate up to 30,000 dancers at any given time. Lighting alone — and this includes lasers, pyro and graphic-displaying LEDs — will run up a bill of Rs 20 lakh, and with the growing sense of unease, “There’s going to be emphasis on security too,” Joshi explains.

Sankalp hosts no more than four-five events in a year, most of them in this peak festive season, creating scintillating shows with big-ticket artistes on the circuit. This summer, he spent Rs 5.5 lakh on “research” alone. “We need to know what our audiences expect from us,” which is why 7,000 people in Mumbai were asked detailed questions on what they wanted on their dandiya nights out.

And what makes business sense for Joshi translates into even bigger stakes for artistes like Falguni Pathak who, once Navratri is over, will disappear into artistic oblivion at her Khar residence in her usually dowdy wardrobe — though for her livewire acts for the duration of the dandiya nights she’ll be kitted out in designer jackets by the likes of Abu Jani-Sandeep Khosla.

“These nine days are very important for me,” she confesses. Her acts will stretch on till at least Diwali. Immediately after her several shows in Mumbai during Navratri, she’ll be off to the US to perform for Diwali shows there. The regular pack of Bollywood singers like Shaan, Shreya Ghoshal and Kunal Ganjawalla will be in Mysore for the city’s Yuva Dasara in October. Playback singer Sunidhi Chauhan will be performing in Toronto in mid-October. But the nine-night dandiya show starting tonight? Nah, that turf belongs to the likes of Pathak, Preety-Pinky and Patel alone. “From now till Diwali, I’m going to be extremely busy,” says Pathak, so what if it will be followed by a long lull thereafter — Pathak, after all, is no Bollywood playback singer. Her price for the nine nights of performance? She charges Rs 1.5 crore for the event.

If she charges what most singers would salivate to make even over a year, her schedules are also punishing. If she’s planned this year’s entrance in a hot-air balloon, she’s also spent time travelling to the interiors in Gujarat to listen to and incorporate folk songs into her repertoire. Unsurprisingly, companies are more than willing to shell out any amount to book her. “This is an important season for me as an artiste,” she reiterates.

Nor is she the only one. Behind the glitz and festivities are artistes and event companies who will hibernate for the rest of the year on the basis of their earnings over these nine nights — because they can well afford to. Take Preety-Pinky, for instance. “We turned down an offer of Rs 75 lakh because we had committed to performing elsewhere,” confirms Preety, who will perform this year in Mumbai. The two sisters had started out at dandiya festivals in Ahmedabad before shifting to Mumbai for the “season shows”. As the money got bigger and better, the sisters ended up living in Mumbai too. Interestingly, other than on these nine nights, the duo makes little news. They did have a few Bollywood songs to their credit, but have given up on all that because what they make during Navratri is something that music bands struggle to make over six months. “The money is unbelievable,” says Preety, and with a wardrobe overflowing with costumes, they still find it a challenge dressing up because, she gasps in mock-horror, “We cannot repeat our clothes!” For the record, this year, their performance will have their “entrance” strictly in accordance to Vaastu.

In Ahmedabad, event planner Jaideep Mehta has planned the unthinkable. On the grounds of the

YMCA Club, renowned art director Chika Kharsani is creating a set that will bring alive the magic of the city’s old, walled city. Beginning this evening, Mehta is expecting 12,000 people every night. He’s not worried about making money. “Even before the start of Navratri,” he smiles, “we should break even.”

With Vodafone and Volkswagen as his main sponsors, Mehta’s scale of operation is larger than most in Gujarat. If most companies spend Rs 35 lakh for a three-day dandiya event, “we spend four times that figure”, says Mehta. Dandiya king Devang Patel will perform at Mehta’s dandiya gig this time — no surprise since Patel prefers to entertain audiences in Gujarat rather than in more-lucrative Mumbai. “I can’t ever dream of stepping out,” he says. In the bargain, he admits to having said no to extremely tempting offers. Back in Ahmedabad, Patel charges Rs 2.5 lakh for a three-hour show — and has even performed non-stop for six hours in the past — multiply that nine times and you can see why he’s happy to perform on his home turf. Then there’s Diwali, when he usually performs in America. This year too, he will tour for four weeks to perform in New Jersey, Boston, Chicago and other places. He charges Rs 2 lakh for each of the dozen-odd performances. This excludes the travel and accommodation expenditures which total to $8,000. No wonder he’s happy to hibernate for the rest of the year.

It’s not just artistes but also companies that make a killing during Navratri. “We make a sizeable profit,” acknowledges Joshi modestly. Prestigious event companies like Sankalp and True Events, notwithstanding the recession, usually recover their expenditure before the nine-nights festival begins — through sponsors and ticket sales alone. Apart from recovering Rs 3 crore, a source from Sankalp says that Sankalp will make a tidy profit of 15-20 per cent easily during just the Navratri season. “An event company of repute doesn’t spend any money. It’s all taken care of by sponsors and ticket sales,” adds an industry source. Established companies find other sources of revenue too: television channels that telecast the event live; film and television production houses keen to promote their films and serials through it; entrepreneurs who rent stalls to promote their products.

Much like the traditional festival which celebrates the homecoming of the mother goddess, acts by the likes of Falguni Pathak and Devang Patel are a sort of homecoming too. No New Age dandiya would be complete without them, and yet, you’ll hardly hear of them for the rest of the year. Like the goddess, theirs is a seasonal homecoming too. Welcome to the Navratri season of 2009.