KOCHI: On a Saturday evening at The Muse Room, a small performing arts centre set in Panampilly Nagar, three men with faces half painted walked onto the stage. Calling themselves ‘Tattva Trip’, the trio entertained the gathering with a selection of their songs for an hour.
Suraj Mani, who took centrestage, is a familiar name in the city’s rock music scene, having started with Motherjane as a vocalist. Explaining the half-painted faces, he explained, “We live in a world where people are narrowed down to definite categories. This painted face is symbolic in that it pushes you to embrace and explore that self of yours that defies categorisation.”
Accompanied by Dhinkar Nayak on the bass guitar and backing vocals and Naveen Thomas playing the lead guitar, Suraj and the Tattva Trip treated the gathering to an evening of acoustic rock blended with poetry.
And poetry it certainly was, with the songs, penned by Suraj himself, reflecting on social or philosophical ideas.
Numbers like ‘Anxious Attachment’, ‘Mahabali’, ‘Disillusioned’ ‘Chasing the Sun’, ‘La Petite Mort’ and ‘Listen like the Blind’ dwelt on themes ranging from the domestic to the political and the personal. When the show had almost wrapped up, there were demands for an encore, which the trio were only too willing to oblige, with ‘Tathagatha’, a song based on the Buddhist worldview of living in the here and the now.
“When you feel deeply about the things happening around you, but you can’t do much about it, art becomes a vehicle wherein you can give form to your thoughts,” is what Suraj, who works as an engineer while not writing music, has to say about his art.