Music and Me

When I was a kid I grew up listening to my dad playing the Tabla. It is an Indian drum played with your fingers. I remember him playing the Tabla for hours at a stretch. And he would sing in his deep melodious voice and I would listen. That I could not learn the Tabla or Indian classical music is one of the things I rue the most to this day. But I did develop an discerning ear for music. I love to sing now and then and I do it well enough for someone not trained in music. Music has not deserted me at any point of time in my life. I find a sort of solace in music that I have not found in anything, anywhere or anyone else. My introduction to music started with Indian classical and Kishore Da, Mohammad Rafi, Lata Ji, Asha Ji, Hemanta Mukhopadhyay, Manna De etc. And except for a brief adolescent phase I have never found new Bollywood music very attractive. With the progression of years I started to inculcate a taste in Rock music and other alternative sounds. It might have been the hormones and the society that sparked my interest but once I got into it there was no turning back. I found myself in good rock music. I started mild with 80's U2 graduated into GnR, AC/DC and Led Zeppelin then came college, I had briefly heard Pink Floyd previously but soon it became a life line. Psychedelic was around me day and night. In the background I started listening to metal, punk, trance, lounge, alternative, progressive, grunge, indie, industrial and so on. Towards the end of college I started listening to death metal but I will accept the fact that except for a few bands I am not a big death metal fan. I would rather have old school metal music any day. In the fall of 2009 I came to the United States. In a year or so I feel like I have matured more than in the entire 22 years of my life that I spent in small town Durgapur, India. And I have gone back to listening to Indian classical music, not that I do not listen to good rock music anymore. Music has kept me running through out this time. Every day for some time I still close my eyes crank up the volume and go back to my "safe place". Somewhere where there is only me and music and my ethereal love and nothing can harm me and I listen to my favorite songs. The thoughts that they trigger in my head I cannot explain because they are as complex as they are fleeting. Music makes me happy, it makes me sad, it excites me, it calms me down, it soothes my soul. I wish I can always have this refuge to fall back upon whenever I need it.

Friendly Neighborhood Indian

I am fervently Bengali and wholeheartedly Indian. I grew up in Durgapur, in the industrial heartlands of West Bengal. In school I guess I had as many non-Bengali friends as Bengalis. My scores in Bengali were always on the lower side (Just for the record my lowest score in ICSE was in Bengali) and people have made fun of it. I am apparently not Bengali enough because of my ways and how I talk, dress, interact with people and my chaste Hindi. My Hindi apparently being pretty good for people from my part of the country. It does not have a Bengali accent according to some people who have mistaken me for someone from Bihar or UP. But I am not "thet" enough to be identified as someone from the Northern States or Bihar. I have always reveled in this. The uniqueness of India and that you can be from one place and be so different from someone else in your own country and yet the same, yet very Indian. I have also been a butt of a few "bloody NRI" jokes some of which might not have been jokes actually.

But now my friends here tell me that I do not have an "Indian accent". I have heard enough "slurpee" jokes to know what that sounds like, though I have only heard very few people in India talk like that. And I do not know whether to like it or not. I am proud of my Indianness, does it mean now I am a little less Indian now? I swear by the tricolor in my room I am not. I guess I will have to compensate otherwise to make myself more Indian. I wonder what I can do? But until I discover my true being in this incredible quagmire of identities I remain what my friend Arun Krishnamoorthy calls "your friendly neighborhood Indian".



[P.S. an NRI for the uninitiated is a Non Resident Indian or in more clearer terms according to "someone" a bloody backstabber who deserts his own country for greener pastures and a few thousand extra dollars.
"thet" Hindi is another word for chaste Hindi but the connotation is a little more complex and less serious but the complexity is lost in translation.
And Arun I had been writing this for a while but thanks for the ending.]

Who's Gonna Save My Soul Now

I was watching the Future Shorts series on Youtube. I even downloaded a bunch of the shorts. I loved the Black Hole thing and this one too. The animation is awesome and the dialogues incredible.