 Almost 15 years ago, I was teaching mathematics to a bunch of children at one of the shelter homes of Salam Balak Trust. Their stories and struggles of life on the streets had a profound impact on me. Leaving my fully funded PhD and a lecture-archive job behind, I came to the UK to do a second master's in mathematics and get a job in banking. Co-founded Friends of Salam Balak Trust with Nick Thompson And over the last decade or so, we have been working to raise funds and awareness for the betterment of the lives of those street children. Please join us on this journey. The Salam Balak Trust set out in 1989 to extend complete support to these homeless children. At the SVT centres, we provide unique and holistic services. We provide children with a roof over their heads. We help children return to their families. We help educate our children by helping them get into school. We provide nutrition and medical support. We help boost the overall mental health and growth of every child. We play games and have fun. We help put smile on our children's faces. We are both proud and humbled by the three decades we have invested in transforming lives. About 15 years ago, I went to Delhi for the first time and I went on a walk led by a former street child through New Delhi station and the areas around it. And it was eye-opening to put it mildly. It was an extraordinary insight into a brutal and harsh reality that my young guide had lived himself and that other people were still experiencing. But it was also amazing and a much more positive sense in terms of the fluency and energy and vitality that this young man showed. And that was my introduction to Salam Balak Trust, which was the organisation that he had gone through to learn his English and his communication skills. And then I learnt through the Trust how many other similarly amazing stories there were. So we are now headed into our last session of the festival. I hope all of you have enjoyed these three days as much as we've enjoyed putting it together, bringing it back live to London. For all of our wonderful viewers online, thank you for joining us. These sessions from the other two venues will also be put out onto our website and our YouTube channels over the next few weeks. So you'll be able to get to see those sessions that you were torn with wanting to see as opposed to coming to see something else. So it'll all be up there. Just to say a very big thank you to each one of you for being here with us. It really makes it special to be back live to our colleagues at the British Library. Thank you all for your support, our wonderful technical crew, our filming crew, our volunteers, Roli, Jamie, John, Conrad, Bee, and all of the British Library for helping out my own colleagues at Teamwork Arts who have laboured against all odds especially for this festival to make this happen, our programming team, Krithika and Neha, and of course our producer Sharupa, Sam and all our colleagues back at home. On behalf of Namita Gokhale and William Dalrymple, just to record our deepest appreciation to most importantly our sponsors who made this possible. It's been, like I said, in the opening very, very difficult. But we'd like to thank the Rothschild Foundation, the Rajasthan Tourism, Haldiram, the British Council, Chaurangi who gave us that fabulous for those of you who attended the opening reception, absolutely fabulous food. The Karmani and Vindi Banga family trust that supports the Voices of Faith series which happens across and over the year. The Aga Khan Foundation has been our very old partners. Here and now 365, the Great Scotland Yard Hotel. It's a lovely hotel tucked away in Charing Cross. It is Scotland Yard so it's lovely. The Gainsborough Hotel where much of our colleagues now stay. Cobra beer for keeping us not parched and hydrated. And our charity partners, Friends of Salam Balak Trust. Salam Balak Trust is an organization that I helped set up 33 years ago helping to look after street and working children who don't have the opportunity that all of us have of good schools, of a hot meal, of a safe space to sleep and perchance to dream. So Salam Balak Trust reaches out. We look after about 9,500 children every year and many of our kids, we use the arts as a way to be able to rehabilitate them and mainstream them and many of our kids have gone on to be enormously successful and our belief is that you provide a platform to young people anywhere in the world irrespective of their disability or their problems or their challenges and they shine. And that's what we do so if any of you are interested in the information just go on to Salam Balak Trust in Delhi and you'll see all the information. Today our closing session we're going to be in two parts. The first is I'm going to be in conversation with the incredible Rimo Fernandez who we've got all the way here to be with us and perhaps sing as well. And that's going to be for 40 minutes and then we'll do a 10 minute Q&A and then we'll invite Shashi to round it up with a stand-up performance which I hope will not get us all in trouble and that's how we're going to close the evening. So because we're not going to do any thank yous at the end just wanted to say deepest appreciation and thank you all for joining us. And now ladies and gentlemen the superstar Rimo Fernandez So now I'm going to book for a little bit Rimo's book. As many of you know Rimo's written this spectacular biography of his life and times and it's really a know-hows biography. And what it does in many ways is it takes us through Goa before it became part of India. Goa was a Portuguese colony and we're going to touch a little bit about that in the beginning. Rimo lived through some of that and they went off to seal him to escape what they thought was going to be bombings. But also the incredible journey that he's had across hitchhiking, across Europe, serendipity, meeting him in different places and of course the amazing music that he's been able to create but very specifically create music which has been part of his soul. So Rimo thank you so much for a writing the book and giving us that insight into your world and perhaps you can start by just telling us how come you decided to put all of this down on a piece of paper. Yes I'll do that Sanjoy but before I do that I want to say a big thank you for inviting me here and I've always been a musician who also loved writing and drawing but frankly I never ever thought that I would be attending festivals like the Jaipur Literature Festival in Jaipur, so many festivals that I did in India this year and this one the JLF in London under the title of author. I never thought I'd do that but here I am with a book under my belt and yes and I want to tell you that I'm very privileged to be in conversation with this man because he's one of the rare interviewers that I've seen lately who speaks less than the people that he interviews. That's a great quality, I think that's a great quality that he has to just say one sentence and trigger off his interviewee into memories and into speaking into talking in short. So what was your question again Sanjoy? What made you want to write this book? You've written music, you've drawn, what made you want to write the book? I read many books that were written about Goa of the olden days, of the days when I was a kid in Goa and Goa has always been or has been in the past a place that many Goans were embarrassed to say they were from. And a lot of famous Goans who lived in Delhi or Calcutta or Bangalore or Mumbai changed their surnames and their names and anglicized them to hide their goanness. For example, you see two Punjabis meeting anywhere in India or in the world or you see two people from Kerala meeting anywhere, two people from Rajasthan and they all speak in their own mother tongue. But most of the time, there used to be a time when you saw two Goans and they would speak in English. However bad it was, it would be English. How are you men? That kind of thing except Konkani, the language of Goa. When Goa became a fashionable destination for the whole world, a lot of these Goans rediscovered their roots and were proud to be called Goans. And they had not grown up in Goa, but they wrote about the Goa that they never knew really as children. And I couldn't find the Goa that I knew later, that I knew from birth, sorry, in these books. And that's one of the reasons why I felt like writing about, and I started off with just a few chapters about my youth, about my childhood in Goa and before I knew it, it became a whole book but there was a gap in between because I was busy with other things. But when I was finishing, it was amazing to have it signed to a publisher like Harper Collins in India and my publisher, Udayan Mitra, who also edited my book, suggested almost towards the end that I write a song about writing the book. And I told him that I can't write a song on commission or on suggestion. I can't do that unless it's a film song or something where I've got to write what the hero feels for the hero. That's easier because it's not about what I feel about something. What I feel has to come only when I feel it, right? But curiously, on the very day after I sent in the manuscript of the book, this whole song came to mind, came to my heart and I wrote it. So if I may, I'll answer your question with a verse. Just one verse of that song. Can I have more guitar, please? Almost as loud as my voice, the same volume, that's the mix I like. I tried to fit my life into a hundred thousand words but even a hundred zillion wouldn't have been enough. I tried to cut my story short but he so thought I had to abort. Oh, I didn't write off the cuff cause I didn't wish to bluff. For words are little birds, you never know where they'll fly and what memories they'll pick up. They're never follow terms, they're prone to dig up worms or to sing a song and pure day into the sky. I was told that music was a very good entertainment, something to be done socially in the evenings at parties but that I needed a respectable profession to work in. When I was a kid, there was this cousin who came back from England and the whole family made a huge fuss. Everybody spoke Portuguese in Goa, right? So I asked him, why is it so important that cousin Garcia is being made such a fuss over? Oh, he was an architect, he came back as an architect in London. And I said, what does an architect do? They told me he designs houses, designs. Design is drawing and I love drawing. I said, I also want to be fussed over if that's a respectable profession. Well, that's what I'll do. I'll draw houses. And I don't know why it was a very silly reason, I guess. That obsession with being an architect stayed with me right until I finished high school and I joined architecture and it's only at the age of 18 when I was midway through the course that I achieved the age of reason, I guess. It's not for nothing that they say that adulthood is declared at 18. When I turned 18, I made a few decisions in life and I said, I want to only work in things I love doing and there's nothing I love more than music. So why am I studying architecture? I wrote to my father saying, I've seen clearly, father, I'm not going to work as an architect ever. So let me finish this torture and come back to Goa. I was in Bombay, which I hated every day of my life because it was so different from Goa. I started appreciating Mumbai much later. But at that time as a school kid, just out of Goa, out of pristine, paradisical Goa, I just couldn't stand the crowds and the filth and the disorder of Bombay, I guess. But my father gave me very wise advice, not an order. If it had been an order, I think I might have rebelled and done just the opposite. But he said, you know, son, you've already finished three years of the course. There's only two more to go. So I would advise you to complete the course because otherwise you're going to feel like an incomplete man. The day your music doesn't work, you're going to regret not having completed the course. So I suggest you complete the course and then do what you like. Going to music, going to become an astronaut, do whatever you want to. And I thought that was a very wise thing to say. So I completed the course without having my heart into it anymore. And I do have an architecture degree somewhere, a moth-eater, of course, but it's there. And I published a photograph of that moth-eater degree in the book. But Rima, pretty much when you were even in school, you know, you were part of this boy band. The bands in that time was, like he said, entertainment, weddings, social occasions. But there was this one occasion which became magical and you had everybody, including the elders, get out there and shake their booty, so to speak. Yes. Before that, I must correct you and tell you that we never played at weddings because the worst crime we could commit at that time was to charge for a performance. You know, we just performed as amateurs, especially when we were school kids. So it was always a recitation. They were like in a concert that they held at the local clubs for the members of the clubs. Social events. Yeah, social events. And yes, I had this group. I had this group and I had this friend called Alessandro de Rosario. And we had never heard the word improvisation. We didn't know what it was. At that time, the thing to do, and it still is for a lot of musicians and a lot of bands, is to copy a record as faithfully as possible. Try and reproduce it as faithfully as possible on stage. So you sing a little song. You try to sound like John Lennon. You try to sound like Paul McCartney. You try to play like George Harrison. You try to drum like Ringo Starr and everything was as per the record. And his friend and I started singing this song called La Bamba, which had just come out. The version by Trini Lopez had just come out at that time. I'm talking about the 1960s. The version so that you can place what and where I'm talking about. Then we started to sing La Bamba. And towards the later part of the song, we couldn't stop. We couldn't stop. And the ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah part was repeated again and again. And again we would go into ba-la-la-la-la-ba-ba. And he would say ba-ba-ba-ba. And I kept improvising over that. Then I kept singing ba-ba-ba-ba. And he kept improvising over that. Like I told you, we'd never heard about the word improvising. society, the Panjim society who was sitting in the audience had never heard of an improvisation either. And what was happening on that evening was like sheer magic. We didn't know what was happening either. Not only the youth at the back, but even the people in suits in the front, and I don't really mean you, but they too were clapping and singing along and it was wonderful. So I think that's the magical moment you were talking about. And of course you go on and you start writing your own music. We'll come back to college in a second, but there's this one incident that you write in the book where you're all set. You've got these two or three songs and you go to a recording studio, which earlier used to be all set to do classical music and they stuck three mics in front of you. Well I started writing songs when I was in school in Goa and then when I moved to Bombay to study, to faithfully study architecture, I joined a band called the Savages and they were a recording band. I mean they had that hallowed piece of vinyl called a record. They made records, which was if you made records in India at that time you were sitting at the right hand of God the Father and I was joining that band and so we went to record our songs, not our songs, we were commissioned to record four songs out of which they chose two of my compositions. And we walked into the studio, four guys with jeans and t-shirts and long hair for that time and beads and stuff like that. And at the mixing desk was this gentleman in a dhoti and a kurta immaculately white stuff who stuck two huge mics and he said this one is for the bass guitarist and the drummer and this huge mic here is for the lead guitarist and the organist. And yeah who's going to sing this song? Okay you're going to get an individual mic for your voice. And we told him sir this is not the way that rock music should be recorded. We need to have mics for each instrumentalist. In several mics in fact for the drums, one mic for each instrumentalist. His pit his pan into his piton which was like ten meters away accurately and he turned to us with a face which was enough to put fear into anybody. He said I've been recording Shankar Jai Kisan for the last 25 years and you hippies want to teach me my job. We tried to tell him that this was not film music and especially not film music of the 60s you know and 70s. But there was nothing we could do and we had to record that record in that way and I was so proud to have a record I was looking forward to having a record of my own and we recorded it and I went home for the next holidays and before I even showed it to my friends I broke it. I'm ashamed to say I broke it because I could not stand the sound of that recording. And I re-recorded those compositions of mine recently. By the way I must tell you that whenever I have read the autobiography of a musician I've always wanted to listen to his music simultaneously. So always had to go and Google it nowadays, Google it, look for it before I had to go to record shops, buy cassettes, whatever. So I decided to put together a playlist on Spotify, a free playlist by the way. You have to pay to listen to that, you only have to pay to buy the book that's it. No additional hidden costs here. And in that there are 25 songs at least by now maybe a few more which are written out in the book, in the order in which they feature in the book. And some of them my earlier songs which I wrote when I was in school I had never recorded them. So together with writing this book which was such a sheer nostalgia there was also the fact that I was revisiting those old songs and recording them. So the whole thing was a wonderful trip into the past for me. And of course many years later you landed up at Abbey Road where you recorded. No I didn't record I just walked across the road and I got a photograph clicked while I was walking across the zebra crossing that's all. You know you were already becoming somebody who was well known in the Bombay music scene and yet in many ways you gave up all of that. And you said okay I'm going to now give up all of this, all my stuff in Goa and you decided to go to Europe. Yes I was a student. I was known in the Bombay scene in the very underground kind of Bombay scene you know the college university scene where we had all those fests and festivals and college days and there were a group of us who later on became better known musicians of India. And yeah but as soon as I finished my architecture course I wanted to travel and see the world. You know that was one of the main things I was passionate about. And my father suggested buying me around the world ticket a three month tour with a few weeks in each important country or whatever but that's not the way I wanted to see it. I had met so many European youth who had come to Goa and who were living on the beaches. Some people called them hippies and they themselves called themselves freaks. They preferred the word freaks somehow. And it was very much in keeping with my thinking at that time my age. I was just out of college in my early twenties and I wanted to be a Goan hippie in Europe. You know that's the way that I wanted to see Europe. Not on an all paid trip with hotels and everything arranged. And I wanted to hitchhike so I came to Europe ready to. I read in books very romantic reports about how youth travelled here in Europe and the jobs and they picked up along the way washing dishes. Wow picking grapes in the summer. Wow babysitting not really my cup of tea but yeah why not. So I came ready to do all that and I'm so happy to tell you that not once did I have to work in anything else rather than in playing my guitar and singing in those two and a half years which I spent based in Paris but I travelled around eight countries in Europe and in North Africa hitchhiking with the tent and heversack and a girlfriend. We'll come to that later and playing in underground stations in the tubes in the tubes in the metro stations and passing my hat around in the restaurants singing in pedestrian streets it was lovely. Venice was the best place to sing in one of the best places to sing in and yeah that's what I did. And that's when you also discovered that your nipple was an erogenous zone. No that was after I came back from Europe. Tell us about the discovery. It's in the book I'm not mixing this up. Sex maniac this guy. Anyway I had discovered it on my own you know alone and I was embarrassed I thought there was something wrong with me you know I thought my female hormones were stronger than the male and I kept it a secret from everybody especially from my girlfriend because until I met my first foreign girlfriend in Goa she happened to be American and we went out and we're sitting doing this thing that Americans called petting and necking that's what they call it in the car in the night in the in Dona Paola which overlooks the Mandavir river and the whole bay and the blah blah blah and the first thing she did when we started to kiss was reach for my nipples and I said how come you're doing that and she said why? She said men have you know erogenous nipples as well I said really it's not just I mean it's not just me she said no of course not I was so relieved I was so relieved I'm normal yes I'm normal and wow in case there's any man suffering in silence please tell your wives about it and have a good time tonight you'll have me and my book to thank for it but having discovered that it was just you know then you were a serial lover with your black boots long hair beard and guitar and you experienced as a serial lover across Europe and Africa I think I told you it's a sex maniac anyway I think sex is a very important part of life it's a very important force that drives us and that's one thing that we you know we don't write about especially Indians don't write about in our autobiographies you know biographies I think it's so interesting it's as interesting as knowing what made you make that music you know what was a driving force behind it and but in India we are a nation that quietly multiplies and reproduces every few years with one of the highest populations in India but we don't talk about sex you see simply we multiply but we never talk about sex I decided to talk about sex why not you know and especially when I was growing up and how interesting how fascinating it is you know that's what I tried to put across and it says normal as eating and drinking and sleeping but that's one thing that differs from country to country from society to society culture to culture religion to religion so our approach to sex differs very much where we come from and at which religion we've been brought up believing in and so in that way I think it's different from eating in a meeting everybody eats everybody has a glass of water there's no questions asked but about sex some societies will frown upon it ask questions and the others will not it will be easier and freer in some other countries so I think it's a very important part of who I am who I was and how I grew up as a goan Christian family who later on decided to think for himself and so yes so I wrote a lot of my sexual experiences but never really in a sex explicit way it was more about the longings and the desires of a young boy and then the fulfillment of a young man and relationships rather than I don't think there are any steamy sexy scenes in the book I'll have to pick out the page numbers but I'll do that later you know one of the things are removed four years you travelled through Europe with your guitar and you had so many different incidents and memories and conversations and meeting people some who betrayed you some who stole from you across all of that there was always your guiding guardian angel who protected you with so many points of time tell us a little bit about that okay because hitchhiking can be very dangerous this we're talking about between 77 and 78 is when I did 77 and 80 sorry when I did my hitchhiking and busking if you don't for those who don't know is like I described playing in underground stations and in restaurants sometimes having to pass your hat around if you wear one and yeah you can you know when you're living out on a tent and hitchhiking from unknown people you come across a lot of different situations and you find yourself in different situations like for example in Algeria when I took a bus from Tunisia to Algeria we reached Algeria four hours late because of Algerian immigration and I saw that my bag was empty you know the bag which I had slung around my shoulder so there was no purse there was no passport the purse was okay because I was earning along the way you know I wasn't travelling with a huge amount of money I was earning as I was travelling so that was not such a problem and I had my guitar but without a passport in the 1970s an Indian passport there was no Indian consulate or embassy in Algeria it was just a fault how was I going to travel out of the country or even in the country and we had landed and we had reached the bus had dropped us at a square which was at a sunken level from the rest of the city so there was stairs going up to the roads which are above the square on all four sides and I started walking around that square shouting like a madman not like a madman but requesting whoever had taken my passport Monsieur, please give me my passport keep the money please but give me my passport please Mr, please return my passport keep the money if you wish but return it a Indian passport is useless you can't sell it you can sell an Indian passport it's not a passport it's not an American passport it's not an English passport give me my poor Indian passport please otherwise I'm screwed I can't do anything here so please it's not an American passport it's not a British passport just give me my poor little Indian passport so I can travel and be safe and I kept on doing that and my girlfriend was sitting on her luggage and watching me for half an hour she said listen how long are you going to shout like this it's useless the whole city is sleeping I said go away no I'm not moving from here and I kept on going going the rounds of the square when suddenly there was an object that flew in the night and fell at my feet it was my passport yes, wow it was my passport the kind Robert took pity on me on this no I really admire his you know whatever he might have wanted to rob my money but he took pity on this situation and well I had my passport back and there were lots of other incidents tell them about the sugar cube oh the sugar cube I was in Paris and my visa had expired finally it didn't give me an extension anymore I had stayed for two years, two and a half years at that time we needed visa every time we travelled from one country to the other so I had exhausted my good luck in getting visas for Spain for Portugal, for England, for here, for there and for getting extensions in the to the French visa so I decided to just stay on as as a visa less person in Paris for a little while and in the nights I used to have this nightmares of being stopped because there was a lot of control at that time in Paris in the metro and I'm sure that is even now I didn't know what I would do if they asked me and I used to actually wake up sweating in the night thinking what would happen and there I was one morning walking in the in a Parisian metro with leather boots subtle here and my jeans in the boots and I had hair down till here a beard and an overcoat till my knees almost and earrings they had just come into fashion for men in Paris I got my ears pierced and when suddenly there were three cops that I could not avoid and they asked me for my papers and I don't know from where this cold cool attitude came to me at that moment and from where this idea came to pretend that I spoke French for the British accent I said I pretended I was not really from there and I said oh passport passport, Monsieur mon passport, ambassade andienne ambassade andienne, pourquoi? Revalidité Revalidité and I'm trying to explain to him as if he's a dumb kid, you know and hitting my hand on my other hand to show the stamping of the revalidation of the passport Revalidité and smiling at him sweetly all the time so he told me well you should have a paper from members in that case and I'm pretending I don't understand him Revalidité so they decide to search me so they put their hands in my pockets huge pockets overcoat they found something hard, like a cube and they said ha ha we got this guy they took it out and it was a cube of sugar which I had unconsciously put in my pocket and I had a coffee and they had put two cubes of sugar in my saucer instead of one and I used only one so I put one so they looked at each other the two cops looked at each other and smiled and said okay he's not into drugs he just has a sweet tooth and they said well the next time ask the embassy for a paper and off I went oh my god after that I realized what kind of situation I had been saved from and that's why I wrote in the book it does not really reflect any religious beliefs when I wrote a guardian angel although a guardian angel is something that's very common in the Christian and Catholic religion one always talks about a guardian angel he's this white angel with wings who is invisible to everybody but he's there to save you if you're walking into the street where there's a car coming he pulls you away from there and stuff like that that's not the angel I'm talking about but I spoke about there was another time when my girlfriend and I were hitchhiking in Algeria or was it Tunisia and there was this very kind Tunisian who took us to dinner at a nice restaurant and then told us that we were welcome to sleep in his house there was only his wife and his mother there was a guest room for us and he gave us the guest room and he said and after about half an hour after we went to sleep there was knocking on the door and he said you know it's late so my wife and my mother have gone to sleep I cannot wake them up because my mother is a heart patient so she needs her sleep so let me sleep in the room and we didn't want the stranger to come sleep in the room we had to take the whole night and finally we were here he said listen it's so cold out here and it was really cold it's a desert you know so the nights were extremely cold and after some time he did get into the room because we felt guilty keeping him out of his own room in his own house and he said I'll sleep on the floor and he went to the cupboard and he took an extra bed sheet and he slept on the floor and we said again we started again oh please I'm not used to sleeping on the floor my arms are aching my back is aching my legs are aching just give me a small corner in your bed he said no way no way at all and this went on for another half an hour and again we started to feel guilty it's his house you know okay so my girlfriend went to the end of the bed which was against the wall and I went also next to her and we told him okay Mohammed you can sit you can sleep on this side of the bed thank you thank you and he's thanking us which made us feel even more guilty he slept there and he started to snore when he started to snore we started to feel really safe after a while there was a leg coming on top of me Mohammed wake up wake up your legs on me okay okay and then he would go to sleep half an hour later his arm would come across me on my girlfriend Mohammed get up and we spent the whole night that way until we saw sunshine coming through the curtains and we looked at the side of the bed no Mohammed finally you know finally and we got out of bed we looked in the cupboards to see whether he was hiding there somewhere in the bathroom you know he wasn't there we had a shower and we were going to look we met him because he was the local baker and he had a bakery and a pastry shop and we had gone to buy bread and there he was and he invited us to dinner he said oh I love to meet French people to not me my girlfriend was French and that's how it all started the next day we were so angry so angry with him you know mostly because we felt betrayed by that show of friendship you know so there was a knock on the door and we approached the door really to blast him out and we opened the door and there's two beautiful ladies well ladies with beautiful eyes and covered till the top of their noses come in looking at us with fire and hatred in their eyes with heavy laden trays with breakfast for us silver trays and we realized that they had all this anger and hatred for us because you know they didn't know what her husband had been doing with us the whole night so we tried to tell them but they didn't speak any French we tried to tell them in English but they didn't speak any English they just gave us more dirty looks and walked away we had breakfast and we walked down to the to the town to the little town under the at the bottom of the hill where his new house was and we went to the to the bakery and my girlfriend let him have it and she was down in the in the baking room and he saw us and he went to white like the first time I saw somebody literally going white as if he had seen ghosts and he tried to keep her quiet he said listen you're ruining my reputation in front of my my employees here please keep it quiet she took no pity I don't think he ever invited any tourists for dinner after that but there was this guardian angel who protect us from a lot of situations like that and it's a dangerous world it can be a dangerous world but we met so many wonderful people that it it was more than made up for these guys and then finally you wanted to come back to India you just missed Goa and you came back and that again began a whole new story with different music so tell us about why you came back what were you missing and then the musical journey because I know the way you can run out of time very quickly well the first year in Europe was a revelation you know everything was a revelation each new each new country each new season was a revelation was wonderful the second year was a great revelation of familiarity because I knew the seasons then and I felt wow I know this country I know this weather when the third year started routine started coming in and the summer went off fine but when autumn came I started to feel a bit depressed and I started to miss the sight of coconut trees of rice fields of the beaches of Goa and and I realized that that's where I wanted to live and travel as much as I could in the rest of my life if I could if I was able to where I wanted to live and where I really belonged was in Goa and that's what made me come back and when I went back I decided this is where I'm going to settle now and I'm going to earn my living not in a very respectable way as an architect but doing only things that I love doing and I actually sat down and made a list of what I love doing people and shortlist it was number one music number two drawing, number three writing so in music already I was playing I was composing songs in drawing I decided well I'm not going to become a painter and draw paintings and have exhibitions I'll do something more commercial what can I do and I thought of postcards because there weren't nice enough postcards in Goa there were lousy photographs and the printing was so bad the green of the coconut trees was in the blue sky and stuff like that the printing of the early 80s in Goa was something else and in writing where I just put together the poems I had written right from college and I put out a book of poems and then eventually music took over everything and it actually encompasses my other two loves, you know because I write my lyrics and I love drawing and I also design my own album covers and stuff like that so music just took over and a lot of your music continued to be very good in its roots and yet you also crossed over and Bollywood just loved you and you started creating some fabulous songs and I know that she's given us a round up time but perhaps we can just touch upon that how that transformed your life as well and what happened with both the Goan music and the Bollywood music and then if you would like to play. I was never an exponent of Goan music I did release one album of old Goan songs and old Portuguese songs which I grew up to in Goa and which I couldn't find in record shops in Goa anymore I called that album Gold Goan Gold and it's still one of my favorite albums among Goans because Goans love nostalgia and but always you know my main body of work was always my compositions my creations and Bollywood never attracted me and first of all I didn't know Hindi well enough to even think to even have that thought crossed my mind music and frankly at that time I looked down upon Bollywood music because music directors at that time used to have bass guitarists who would play wrong notes just to provide the low frequency it didn't matter on what chord or what key they played the compositions were beautiful Indian melodies but the western instruments that played along with them was just another it wasn't my cup of tea then when the first Bollywood offer came to me I'm sitting in Goa quietly not interfering with anybody and Shyam Benegal called up and asked me to do music for Trikal and in the same year Gold Anand called up and asked me to do music for Jalva now these are two two films in totally different so mainstream mainstream and what was then known as art cinema or parallel cinema Trikal was a very art film kind of film and Jalva was a very masala and action kind of film right to the extent that it was a copy of the I believe it was a copy of the Beverly Hills cops which I never saw unfortunately I must see the Beverly Hills cops copied from but the music that I did in both became hits in India Jalva in the commercial genre and the music for Trikal in the art film genre but still I never moved to Bombay and tried to make a career out of films out of film music was always my own songs that interested me more so I did a few songs for films after that over the years and luckily for me and what film music gave me was exposure my god I did one film one commercial one song in one commercial film Jalva and I had been doing my own songs in English for years and years and and I was known by a niche audience in India those who listened to music in English and the next time I went to Mumbai after I did Jalva I was in a taxi and at the traffic lights where the street urchins come and wipe your windscreen for a few coins from the taxi driver the urchin saw me and said Jalva, Jalva because I also appeared in the film for a few seconds you blink and you miss me that kind of thing and that made me realize the power of Indian cinema you know it was amazing just a few seconds I'm exaggerating a few minutes on the screen and I was being recognized by street urchins in Bombay but even that didn't tempt me to go full time so I was really lucky that the few songs that I did in Indian films were huge hits like Pyaar Tov and Aitha and Hama Hama and Omeri Munni which was my own Hindi album finally I was lucky about that okay so we've got a sign to any questions we'll take a couple of questions and then anything? one at the back target magazine if anybody remembers those from the 80s target magazine target magazine so my question and I hope it doesn't come across wrong is I recently re-listened to Omeri Munni and how well do you think has that song in terms of its lyrics? how long has it? aged you're talking about Omeri Munni right? yes I wrote Omeri Munni when there were a few incidents by the way thank you for not asking about nipples that's in Sanjoy's domain I wrote Omeri Munni when there were two or three incidents in India which showed me that there was a sexual revolution beginning with the youth with young girls 12 and 13 year old girls who suddenly were much freer than I was when I was a school boy you'll read about the incidents in the book I won't tell you what they were right now because it will take too long but that's what made me write that song as a warning to the youth saying that hey take a few more years just a couple more years with your Barbie doll at home you're a bit too young you're only 13 stop hitching up your skirt and puffing out your blouse of your school uniform and going out to discos just spend a few more years until you mature a little more because it's not only by that time it wasn't just the danger of pregnancy or of venereal diseases anymore this killer AIDS had just come out so that's the kind of advice I was giving and I think that advice always stands good for youth who experiment with sex before they know enough about it and get into trouble because of it the trouble can be pregnancy can be AIDS can be anything I'm assuming you all want him to sing a little bit because otherwise so let's not take any more questions if you all want him to sing you need to thank you for having had the patience to listen to a singer for so long and so patiently sing a few songs just bits of songs which is a guitar on in Gujarat Goa was the main colony the seat of Portuguese power in India from Goa they governed these little pockets of the colonies in Gujarat in those days where telephones hardly worked to forget internet and it was amazing how it all worked times were different so there's this beautiful song from the man which is students from the man who lived in Panjim in a guest house or in a hostel, students hostel which is across our street used to sing on the evenings when they felt very nostalgic for home in that quiet city without much traffic with dim street lights you could hear them without amplification from their balcony from their veranda in our house and I made my own version of this song sometime back and it became a huge hit and I believe no Goan wedding or Goan party is complete without them playing the song which is always spoken and only understood by the people of the man nobody else understands it nobody else understands all the words and the way they said neither do the Brazilians neither do the Goans really understand every word of their songs and particularly not the Portuguese but you can feel the fire they have in their music and the Goan music itself also has the same kind of rhythm and I'd like to finish this little medley with a Goan folk song yesterday somebody told me lady from Sri Lanka told me that she heard this Goan music and my god I felt I was listening to Sri Lankan Baila music that's what the Goans do when they hear Sri Lankan Baila music they say my god it sounds like Goan music it's so similar the beat, the feel the whole thing behind the music is so similar the Goan Mandoor used to start with a very plaintive and slow or slow song which was a bit reminiscent of the Fado but not quiet because it was in a 6-8 rhythm because Fado is usually 4-4 but there was the same pathos the fact that it was all about broken hearts broken love affairs broken loves and sometimes about fulfilled love as well but beautifully written beautiful poetry and that slow Mandoor was always followed by dual pods, dual pods with these little verses or these little couplets totally disconnected from each other composed by different composers at different times and these couplets were gossip or stories about what happened in the villages like for example what one neighbor's cock did to the other neighbor's hens and how one neighbor had children had a child every year, gave birth to a child every year for 10 years while her poor husband was working on a ship for the last 20 years and little interesting stories like that but very village folkloric do I have time to sing a verse of the Mandoor and the dual pods or should I just go and do the dual pods just one because we need to, we've got the stand up of this, just one of them I'm sorry only one of them I'll choose the dual pods they're always more interesting she's counting how many children she's had one, two, three, four in three seconds all you've got to say is ya, ya, maya, ya four seconds, sorry is that alright, can you say it I want to hear you say it ya, ya, maya, ya beautiful, now you've got to say it with the melody and with the rhythm and with the rhythm and with the rhythm and with the rhythm and with the rhythm and with clapping your hands I won't tell you what it means it means just a minute sorry I didn't stop talking it means let's go maya, let's go but please don't go because the greatest show of them all is coming up here Shashi Tarool is going to be the stand up comedian in a while but before that we'll just sing this and pretend it doesn't mean let's go ya, maya, ya now the melody and the beat is like this ya, ya, maya, ya ya, ya, maya, ya I feel I'm in Goa, the only thing missing is some Cajupeni here really, my god you're a beautiful audience ok now we're going to do it together now we're going to do it together before you stop ya, ya, maya, ya ya, ya, maya, ya ya, ya, maya, ya ya, ya, mister at the end ya, ya, maya and we were British Library thank you very much, Liz and we were you, all of you thank you, you lovely audience thank you very, very much hello, Mike please so after Shashi finishes we'll have Rimo signing his books at the bookstore for those of you who want to buy his books there's got some, read the rest of his story Rimo Fernandez thank you so much for being here with us at the clothing circle whatever you did, if it wasn't good enough you needed to try and do better and keep at it actually village life produces the philosophical ideas that are germane to democratic thought and practice I mean just losing four of your bandmates, soulmates is bad enough but the worst thing is out of those four families of the families blamed me but the progress from 1991 to 2017 I think only took India to a better place it was really through the through the transition into politics that I that I had the good luck of becoming a writer