Sub-culture vulture

Dhanak Dhin: Monsoon with Music Basti is an album launched by young kids from three shelter homes – Khushi Rainbow,Kilkari Rainbow and Ummeed. Containing songs penned by these young children,sung by them and put to music by various artists,this album is a realisation of their many secret hopes. Nauriyal lets the minstrels do all the talking,their excitement and fears made visible through the camera lens.

Nauriyal himself is a part of a thriving sub-culture of the young and the restless shunning “cushy” jobs to create spaces with more honest souls. The website nowdelhi.tv is a personal experiment for Nauriyal,as experimental as his stints with music and television have been. The four-and-a-half years he spent producing shows for a lifestyle television channel left him jaded. The medium was pervasive,the message was not. After severing ties with the electronic medium,Nauriyal turned to the Internet,to seek,discover and give back. Nauriyal’s association with music is perhaps the longest. Always in a band since high school,he still keeps the drums for his two bands — Another Vertigo Rush and Teddy Boy Kill. His personal association with music and the steady influence of artists Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry have shaped his love for documenting independent musicians. Independent music projects for social change are a flourishing sub-culture now,as Nauriyal observes and documents with the Music Basti projects and the Menwhopause project with Flying Souls (Tihar jail’s rock band).

Nauriyal single-handedly helms the nowdelhi.tv project,mostly at night. His days are spent working as a freelance director,consultant and videographer on commercial projects to keep nowdelhi.tv running. The last commercial project he shot for was with Audi’s social innovation unit which partnered Sarvajal to create ‘pay-and-use’ water ATMs in urban villages. He also collaborates with six other visual artists on various projects as part of a collective.

Extension Khirkee is the next project he intends to put up on nowdelhi.tv. This project looks at graffiti as a nascent but emerging sub-culture. Urban villages have become canvases for Delhi’s graffiti artists much to the amusement and chagrin of the village dwellers,he jokes,narrating an incident involving a particularly irate old man whose walls had been defaced by art that he couldn’t comprehend.

With the passage of time,Nauriyal hopes to weave a larger Delhi-in-motion narrative that fuses sub-cultures and underground movements sprouting in the city,which is indeed ‘now Delhi’.