It seems like a gimmick, but how it worked. Sometime back, the Indian rock band Pentagram got together with VH1 and announced that they were going to ask their fans to make a music video for their next release, “Voice.” Making a video takes a lot of effort: listening to the song dozens of times, coming up with a concept, getting together cast and crew and props and so on, shooting the thing, editing the thing, and so on. You’d have imagined a handful of nuts would enter.<\/p>\n
Pentagram got 991 entries.<\/p>\n
Yes, that’s right, 991 music videos. A decade ago, when I worked in first Channel [V] and then MTV and wrote for Rock Street Journal<\/i>, many of us thought that Indian rock was just about to take off in a big way. We were wrong then—there wasn’t much of a following for it outside the college circuit. But if 991 people make music videos for a song, you’ve got to imagine that the number of actual Pentagram fans out there must be many multiples of that. Who knows where this could go?<\/p>\n
Anyway, Pentagram eventually used a composite of the 26 best videos as their official video release. But the rest are available on YouTube. One that Pentagram vocalist Vishal Dadlani especially likes<\/a>, and that Mohit<\/a> brought to my attention, is an anti-reservation video by Varun Agarwal from Bangalore. Here it is:<\/p>\n