Tomorrow(Land) is coming - Does it taste as good as it looks?

Yes, my dearies, you heard right. Tomorrowland supposedly plans on making a mark on the Indian Music landscape sometime next year, and although Universal Music India (The company rumoured to be helping Tomorrowland do so) has refrained from making any sort of statements denying, or admitting, the same; their vaguely-worded press release to the media seems just short of confirmation.

Everyone is starry-eyed about Tomorrowland in our own country, and why shouldn't they be?

In the decade since the first one, Tomorrowland has grown into a mammoth, so-to-speak. It boasts a line-up of the biggest Electronic artists in the world, it attracts a global crowd, and the fantastical theme does, superlatively, its job of transporting all attendees to a dimension far removed from reality.

The announcement, since it hit social media a few days ago, has caused a happy buzz among Indian EDM artists and fans, not unlike the one from your first JD and coke.

However, the real question here seems to be whether Tomorrowland can sustain that buzz, or will it just end in headaches and hangovers?

Amidst all this excitement, at what was probably the first festival of its sort that most EDM-philes discovered, read, heard about, are some questions that nobody seems to have raised so far.

Our country has had a long history with big international names swooping in, and bulldozing the locals out of the way of their super-sized commercial success, be it The British with their eyes on everything, or Lays', who promptly killed local vendors like Uncle Chips and Crax, for the first many years of their reign.

Let's take a look at the current Indian music scene. The last few years have seen a plethora of music festivals pop up left, right and centre. Percept's Sunburn – The pioneer in the Indian EDM Festival scene, Storm Festival in Coorg, The Escape Festival of Art and Music in UP, Ziro Music Festival, NH7 Weekender, Ragasthan, Jodhpur RIFF, to name a few of the biggest.

A large number of these festivals were started, and continue, to promote local musicians, whether folk, Indie or electronic. Every single one of these festivals was built from scratch, moving on to become 'must-attends' for all so inclined.

As anyone who has attended one or more of these indigenous music festivals can tell you, each of them, offers a unique experience.

While Sunburn caters purely to the EDM fans, NH7 started primarily as a Rock festival and later diversified to Indie and Electronic artists.

Jodhpur RIFF began as an effort to promote local folk musicians, providing them with the perfect platform for performance, creation and collaboration.

Ragasthan is a destination festival, not unlike The Burning Man, held smack in the middle of the sand dunes of Jaisalmer, with naught but music and art encompassing you for those few days.

A big part of the charm of each of these festivals, lies in their exclusivity, and the separate elements they bring to the table which come together to paint a beautifully rich and diverse picture of the Indian music scene.

These festivals have, over the last few years, metamorphosed the Indian Independent music scene from a gentle breeze to the storm that is now sweeping the country, taking into its fold an entire generation.

This is where we ask what Tomorrowland (and Universal Music, by bringing it here) eventually aim to accomplish with their advent into the scene. Branding, of course, is one of the biggest agendas.

They will, for the festival, bring in the same artists that any of our festivals would; Artists who will probably play the same songs we've all been listening to for the last 5 years, if not more.

We already do it when we dance all night to Hardwell's mashup of REM's Losing my Religion, or the Trap (or Glitch Hop, or House, or Big Room) mix for Satisfaction. We've been doing it before Tomorrowland, and we will be doing it during, and long after.

The biggest complication Indian EDM Artists have been facing at local festivals over the years, has been the fact that our own event organisers are reluctant to trust an Indian as the headlining act, giving preference to an international, DJ MAG-rated, foreign DJ.

Yes, foreign is important here, because we, as a country, when given the choice between indigenous and foreign products, tend to gravitate to the foreign being better. It has been this way for decades, and although things are changing, the issue is far from resolution.

Taking this fact into consideration, one wonders how an International festival intends to treat the local talent.

Will the festival embrace the local scene and work with artists to give everyone the opportunities and exposure they deserve;

Or, like most other international conglomerates before them, come, conquer and leave with all the spoils, in the process marginalizing indigenous artists even more?

Will Tomorrowland India be the musical revolution our generation is looking for, or turn green with hostility(and greed), and Hulk-smash its way to the top, flattening everything to get there?

Hey, it's one less excuse to go to Europe, and who wants that?