Mumbai - A City of dreams...

Everybody knows how I am crazy about Ireland. But no matter how crazy I am about her, I have realized I can't deny the fact but agree that there is no other city like Mumbai. Why do I feel so?? And how can I be certain?? Well here are some of the reasons why I feel Mumbai is one of the best cities.. and why am I so proud to be a Mumbaikar...

1. Its a city that never sleeps - quite literally. You can take a stroll on the streets of Mumbai at 2am and you won't be alone there will always be a flock of people always.
2. You have shops/restaurants  in Mumbai that are open 24x7
3. You have the first local train at 4am and the last one at 1.30am
4. You have a train service every 2 mins & it carry a total of 2.2 billion passengers every year. Incidentally, the world's population is 6 billion.
5. You have a bus service every 5 mins
6. A city well connected with roads/rails
7. We have the Worli Sea Link
8. One of the safest place for women
9. The Most culturally diverse city - you will find people from every culture, race, ethnic, lifestyle here.
10. You can make it big doing anything here, whether it be window cleaning, shoe polishing, or even just by playing a god man.
11. The city where you have the most richest man living just feet away from the most poorest one.
12.We have the Queen's Necklace (Marine Drive)
13. The City with a 'Never Die' Spirit. We’ve survived repeated terrorist attacks, only to go back to work the very next day
14. Lamington Road - The street where you will find all the hardware & software's ever produced whether released or unreleased.http://s3.hubimg.com/u/5147134_f520.jpg
15. One of the most complex rail and road signalling system.
16. We have a national park right in the middle of the city
17.  It's a city where everything is possible.. especially the impossible.
18. Mumbai is the richest city in India and is the country’s commercial and entertainment capital. It has the highest GDP among any city in South, West or Central Asia and is one of the top ten financial centers in the world.
19. The famed dabbawallas of Mumbai are famous worldwide because of their efficiency, with Forbes giving them the `six-sigma rating, which means that they make about one error in six million transactions.
20. Spread over 535 acres, Dharavi is one of the largest slums in the world and has a population of approximately 1 million. The slum has around 5000 businesses and 15 thousand single room factories. The goods manufactured here are exported throughout the world.

Break Free 2012

So I got a call a couple of weeks ago. It was Keerthi Sagathia, one of bollywood's leading playback singers. He needed a bassist to play for a gig in Udaipur. Now really.. who wouldn't want to perform with Keerthi, not to mention when its an all expense paid trip to Udaipur and back. So I agreed to it.

The journey was quite cool, as we had a flight at 5.30am in the morning, which made us all stay up the previous night so that we can get to the airport at 4am. So we got to Ahmadabad by 6.30am and had us picked up from the airport to take us to Udaipur. We reached our Hotel - Hotel Mansi Palace by about 1.00pm. We had our lunch and headed off to the venue for the sound check. It was quite a good setup that was provided. I was contend with my Hartke 350 but the cabinet was little squeaky. It didn't bother me much. We had a good one hour dedicated for our sound check. Soon we got back to our hotel room, got freshen up and left for the gig.

We opened with Keerthi's new song from an Aamir Khan production "Satyamev Jayate". The crowd went berserk as we started the song. We continued with other tracks for an hour and half. We were quite excited but also really exhausted after staying up for nearly 45 hours on a stretch. The next day we had some other interesting people joining us. We had Naveen Kumar, DJ Lloyd, Mehul Gadani who shared the stage with us. It was really fun jamming with DJ Lloyd. Never thought would get a chance to play with him. He totally rocked the stage.

We were to leave the venue at 10.30pm as we had a flight at 5.30am in the morning. But we ended up performing until 11pm. We finished our dinner and left the hotel by about 12.30am. We are thankful to our driver who zoomed in past the other vehicles and got us to the airport by 4.30am. The best part about any gig is the time you spend with the band traveling, chilling out, rehearsing, sound checking, eating.. its that time of bonding that you always cherish from these memories. Here are some of the pics from the gig.. hope you like them.

Back from the grave..

Pic Courtesy: mademoisellefluo

That's pretty much how I look now, except for the long locks.. haha.. It's been so long since I last posted something.. To be more precise, the last post was on Aug 30th 2011 (you do not have to look for the post, its the one below lol). That's like over 7 months.. Man.. that sure feels so long. So what have I been doing all this time?? Why wasn't I blogging for so long?? well the simple answer is I was plain bored.. haha.. There has been a lot going in my life.. a lot of transitions.. I quit my band, i started a new web design company, I liked a few people, lost a few people, made some new friends, drove some of them nuts.. parents chasing after to get me married.. haha.. yeah lot of things happening..

I was just going through my blog yesterday and realized so much fun it was to write a post and then what happened.. how did i become so boring :P. So i have decided not to stay this way.. and start writing some fun stuff that's happening in my life again. So hello everyone.. Jesse Gigman Alex is back!!