They grew with it.
Popular music, or popularly called pop music, was drawing to its peak. Singles were being released in a record speed. Artists popped up from nowhere. Albums were flooding the market. Solos, bands, collections, remixes, you name it. Music videos had suddenly started to come out in large numbers. Outdoor locations, greens, blue skies, majestic mountains, hot models, like a fairy tale, a mini feature film. Artists were young, cute, full of life, almost a next door guy, or a classmate, a possible catch. Some were so young, with that not even 20s face, fair, round, pointed nose, high caste brahmin, remarkably good looking, jealousy height, small, gentle and a little curly but neatly trimmed hairs, a husky voice, soulful, who sang tragic melodies, with pain, with regrets, with despair, with renewed hope, with desire. What girl on her teens wouldn’t dream of that boy? What girl, who wasn’t allowed to venture out all on her own, who never got a chance even to have a good look at and ogle the boys other than her classmates or immediate neighbours, who dreamt of breaking away from snarling eagle of guardianship at least for once, at least for some time, at least when she was young, wouldn’t fall for that boy?
Moreover it was the right thing at the right time kind of thing. FM radios were already in fashion, that played endless hours of popular music. Choices were limited with television. They had access to the national broadcaster. Television showed a good half hour of pop music every morning. Computers were not common yet. Cyber cafes were sparse. Internet speed was awful. Broadband was still a distant dream. And the youngish boys and girls were in a awestruck wonder with the pop music, words of love, lust, romance and future, tragedies, sorrow, pain and regrets and despair.
It was the time of discovery. They discovered their first chance of love, an act of affection, a certain pride, a sense of purpose, like no one has ever discovered it before. And they discovered the pop music. They appreciated how someone had the same story, same difficulties, same limitations and same fate as theirs, how those emotions were indited, how someone so articulately gave voice to it, how someone composed tunes in concordant with their lurching hearts, and how so many people listened and adored them. It was a love of the age and the love only grew stronger.
Probably by demand and by lack of supply, only cassettes were in fashion. Cassette, that wonderful thing, that beauty beyond age, that small rectangular motif, enclosed in a transparent plastic casing, containing a magnetically coated plastic tape, passed and wound between two miniature spools, one to supply and one to take up reels, one at a time, while the tracks of one side play when the tape is moving in one direction and the other side when moving in the other direction. Once the cassette is inserted into the cassette deck, and the reading head of the deck transforms electromagnetic signal from the tapes into electrical signal and transmits it to output device, then BANG. Magic. Sound. Life. Life from an inanimate object. Life within an inanimate object. The moment of thousand exuberances. You have to see it to feel it.
Cassettes were hunted, borrowed from friends and never returned, even at the cost of constant embarrassment, for those who couldn’t afford to buy a whole album, selected tracks were copied into a fully recordable blank cassette from Audio-Video libraries. In business term, ‘pirated’. Routines were laid out. They had to watch that half an hour of morning show, daily, be updated, on latest releases, latest artists, the heavyweights and their legacies, the entrants and their promises, new tunes, fresh melodies, new labels, new models. Latest developments were noted and discussed. Everyone was busy discovering a new favorite. Music were compared, equated, cherished, favorites were patronised, others were acknowledged and given due attention, and some were outright snubbed, on the grounds of talent the artist possessed, preludes and guitar interludes, jeans that singer/model put on, and overall musical composition of rest of the tracks in their album. Some acceded to the peer pressure and embraced the common favorites as their own, the pretense was intense, and pretended to share a common taste, others confined their favorites to themselves, safe with them, to enjoy whenever no one was around to bother.
Then came the revolution, and everything changed.
Rather, then came the time and everything changed.
Technology. Remittances. Computers. Cell phones.
Computers became conspicuous. With the advent of broadband, internet became reliable, faster and better. That meant opening up to the world of western music. Computers came with new generation video games and inbuilt dvd player which meant movies and more movies. Cable tv subscription exploded. New tv channels were on offer, which meant more choices, more music, more movies, more of everything. Bollywood cinemas were getting better. Glossy, shiny, hot girls, action, romance, flirts, everything.
All in all times were changing, they were opening up, they were growing, old. They went to higher studies, colleges, universities. They saw more of the world, more of people, more of its manoeuvres. More dreams. When only dream used to be to fall in love and romance with the prettiest face around, dreams were cummulated. That school, that scholarship seat, that country, that embassy, that college, that, this, that. Hopes were shattered, hopes were built, hopes were lost, hopes were rekindled. There was so much to dream for. They happily learned the way of life.
The zeitgeist gave way to another zeitgeist.
And like everything else does, that time too passed. And as grown up men and women awaiting a career and a future to worry about, or as future husbands and wives, the tragedy of the refute, the fury of unrequited love, or the fantasy of young romantic love, just could not hold enough to make them care. So could not the music.
Yes, like everyone else, they too failed.
Like everything else.
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They grew with it. And they grew out of it.
They saw them on tv. Playing guitars, banging drums, making music. Neatly dressed, coiffed hairs, dating hottest girls around. An aura of appeal, attitude, a character. They dreamt of becoming everything they saw on tv. Confident, elegant, panache of a personality. They thought they could be like them. Watched, admired, wanted.
Most of them were of an age, a generation, an experience, or no experience at all. That age, that blind arrogance, that illusion of being mattered, being right and only right, a center of gyration. That callow perversity. That spirit of a crusader, like a soldier marching for an assault, with a bayonet fixed rifle, that sense of spearheading change, momentum. That vituperative disgust against the senile imbecility of preceding generations, that castigation, that flagrant disdain for the dereliction of duty of their progenitors. That antagonism.
Life does not imitate arts, life imitates bad television. Who said that? Woody Allen perhaps. A hard working jew. But no sir, life does not imitate bad television, life imitates television, which is essentially bad. In absence of any or good arts, that is where the false hopes come from. Ignis fatuus. Hopes of an impossible, impossible hopes. Some dreams are qualified. There are no shortcuts. Life of arts needs hours and hours of practice, relentless devotion, highest degree of dedication, a complete and whole-hearted fidelity, not as easy as fantasizing one on the screen. So, the dreams of a big house, and the material needs must wait, or might as well never come true. A life rich of arts is usually the province of privileged, as art in itself does not payoff when the show has to go on, a non-performing asset. And there is this bourgeois apathy for everything that does not come with material wealth.
Then, with some wasted endeavours and exhausted optimism, it ended, like it had always been, like millions of those leaves that fall out in the winter, denuding trees, like dark willows, like our lives, that shed its innocence after very birthday. You change, you like it or not. Some try and keep old skin, some can’t. Certain ruminant animals have horns bent in such an angle and in such a way that they can’t hurt others. Isn’t that what youth is like? Life is unfair, Vae victis! The wretched must suffer. What has to be done has to be done. You just don’t have that privilege to go on, you are not a first worlder, you are not white, you don’t belong to the high classes to afford the delay, you can’t even afford that intensity to embrace a life of patience. Then you become what they had always wanted you to be, what you never wanted to be, what you’d always feared to be. Choices, preferential choices, are imaginary, especially in this part of the world. Those invisible forces as a vanguard of the pragmatic construction of your life. A tragedy. A farce. A farcical tragedy. A tragedy rewritten as a farce. Jonathan Franzen. It is the truth that rattles when everyone grows up. No more self-abasement, no more self-inflicted wounds, no more self-reproaches. Just the hard truth. Face it or else time and space will force it upon you. Take that. Yes education is supposed to set you free but fifteen years of basic education they arm you with diligently underlines a fundamental principle, You Are Second To Everyone. You are their golden child, theirs only hope. Your hope can wait, your hope is your progeny, like you were theirs.
After the flow and the ebb, what they leave behind is more than youth or anguish or anguish of the youth, but a foreboded failure of a generation, an avant-garde in reverse, a legacy of loss. Unbroken sequences, unsettled precedents, unchanged rhythms, unchallenged assertions and unanswered questions; nothing changes; they’re not losing any chains that had seemed to bind them to some high principles of righteous morality. Just another brick in the wall. Just another failure. And they are the new generation, a generation marked with perfidious silences, a new generation dedicated more than the last to the prerogatives of power and wealth; to the culture of competition and greed, to the venerated emblems of success and riches, burning own effigies, ready to fight assigned wars, a renegade generation.
Tragedy rewritten as a farce.
The adult guilt.
And they grew out of it.
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