You can make indie big

A BMX rider practises his skills at Carter Road. It`s an extreme sport that features in the documentary

Have you noticed it? The independent arts and music industry - a seed that was planted before this century and then watered in the noughties - has started sprouting green saplings in this country. Granted, it's nowhere close to being a fully grown tree yet but the shoots are visible, be it in the form of the exploding hip-hop music scene or the graffiti that adorns the walls of the city. Yet - and here lies the sad part - it still hasn't got its rightful place under the sun. Independent artistes in India still live under the shadow of the mainstream industry.

An exhibition of street artist Tyler's works at a city gallery

A new documentary series called From the Bay explores why that is, and what can be done to redeem the situation. Mumbai-based advertising professional Ashwin Dutt Ponamgi, who's also a writer and musician, has directed it. He's divided the three episodes into different segments - art, extreme sports and films. But don't confuse ‘art' here as a traditional idea you would find at a fancy auction fetching crores of rupees, or ‘films' as something on the lines of Golmaal 3. Instead, think of someone like Tyler - the street artist who regularly exposes the authorities as emperors with new clothes - or Devashish Makhija, the filmmaker who turned his back on a Bollywood career to make independent films on a shoestring budget.

These are the people whose voices are growing louder as we hurtle deeper into the digital age, but who remain constricted to the margins while the mainstream hogs the limelight (read: fame and money). Ponamgi tells us that there are essentially three contributing factors behind this situation - an apathetic government, self-serving brands, and an audience base whose tastes are still so commercial that they are unwilling to go that extra mile to bring about real change.

The government is the smallest problem in this - should we say - unholy triumvirate. "It's stupid to blame them," Ponamgi feels, though he adds that the powers that be could at least ensure that a megacity like Mumbai has the requisite infrastructure to accommodate more than merely three skateboarding parks. The bigger issue lies with brands, because they are reluctant to give the alternative arts a fair slice of the pie even as they extract their own pound of flesh. "They don't do enough to include these art forms in their marketing mix. The way brands work is that if there isn't enough return on investment, they won't pump money in," Ponamgi explains.

That being said (and this might not be easy for some to digest) the biggest culprit, the chief perpetrator in ensuring that the alternative arts continue to exist largely in the shadows, is the audience base that is reluctant to grab the bull by the horns and turn things around. If they took matters into their own hands, if they turned out in droves for a small independent gig in the manner of the farmers who hit the streets of Delhi, the brands would be forced to sit up and take notice. "It's a vicious cycle," Ponamgi laments. "The brands will say, ‘Audience nahin hai.' And the audience isn't there because brands don't pump in enough money."

Yet, everything said and done, he sees hope for the future. He says that if we can build an ecosystem where a skateboarder can become the sort of icon that Sunil Gavaskar was in the 1970s and '80s, and Sachin Tendulkar was in the '90s, then who's to say that extreme sports won't one day become a viable career option in this country like cricket today is. That, of course, is still a pipe dream. Dilli abhi bhi door hai. But, metaphorically speaking, if we all play the role of a gardener - the government, brands and us audience members - then there is a chance that sometime in the future, the sapling that is the independent arts in India will grow into a leafy plant and eventually, a fully grown tree.

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