Elegy to False Alarm

False Alarm is the name of a Western Music Band, which existed in the small provincial town of Palghat in Kerala in the early eighties. To give you a sense of time and place we must digress a little.
Those were times of innocence. Palakkad is the small district headquarters of an agrarian district. It is the Rice Bowl of Kerala and the general populace depended directly or indirectly on agriculture. The other main income groups were the NRIs who left the shores of Kerala with minor skills like shorthand and typewriting and made their fortunes in Malaysia and the Gulf. We studied in Govt Victoria College, an institution more than a 120 years old, named after the original Queen Victoria I. It was a time when bell-bottoms were out and rampant unemployment was in. Liberalization had not touched the shores of India and music was difficult get. Vinyl records were out and Cassette tapes had just become popular. Videocassettes had made an entry but were available in the houses of a few rich NRIs. The run of the mill provincial type student was busy watching movies of Prem Nazir and Jayabharati(one sexy siren, more about that later: lest we digress too much) and humming tunes of Yesudas from Malayalam movies. We, then in college, had a bleak future. Many of us were condemned to run small businesses or work as pharma representatives.
Our day in Victoria College in those days was only an opportunity to eye the girls as they waft in and out in two shifts, doe eyed, wearing dhavanis and saris. We were singularly unsuccessful in romancing any of these maidens for the simple reason that they were too scared to complicate their lives. They and we believed that true romance happened only in movies. We kept trying nevertheless…. Life was a journey in a crowded bus, attending classes, an occasional movie in the local movie theatre and back to home. The walls of the college had graffiti, the class rooms had tall ceilings with cobwebs. The desks in the classroom had a small round slot to keep your inkpot in which probably students of a bygone era would probably dip their quills and write their notes. We were sex starved and had plenty of time in our hands.
We read Nietzche and Sartre, Harold Robbins and Ayn Rand. And we listened to plenty of music. To give you an idea we were pretty advanced in spite of our limited exposure. We heard Gerry Rafferty, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Gordon Lightfoot, Pink Floyd, Deep Purple and watched video tapes of the Woodstock Music festival. And there were some of us who could strum chords in a guitar. We were passionate about music and some of us spent all our living hours playing guitar trying to get tunes right. We had an occasional smoke from a joint and booze binge for diversion. We started a band and started playing in youth festivals. We certainly got a lot of attention doing something different in a provincial town. There are conflicting versions of how the band got its’ name. My memory is clear. We were sitting on the Verandah of the hostel on a lazy college day afternoon, watching girls passing by. The words fell out of my mouth when I saw a fire engine (or was it an Ambulance? ) going with sirens screaming. My band mate Anand thought it was a great name for a band and so we became the False Alarm.

It began innocuously enough. I still remember the first performance. We managed to rope in two girls (who were sisters of class mates), hired a good sound system and played Devil Woman by Cliff Richard with screaming vocals and some basic guitar runs. It was appreciated but the prize went to another Band, which played Country roads by John Denver with great vocals, and harmony. That was a revelation- that good music primarily calls for oodles of talent. Good equipment comes next. We went back into a huddle. We gathered experience playing at college festivals, beat competitions even marriages. We became known to be professionals of a sort playing largely to an audience, which couldn’t care less for music of the western kind. Lyin’ eyes by Eagles and Boxer by Simon & Garfunkel were played to an audience largely consisting of unsuspecting souls raised on a diet of Malayalam Playback singers. And there were no more girls wearing skirts on stage. We were a bunch of passionate dreamers dedicated to making great music. We hoped one day to play great music before a musically enlightened and discerning audience. We popularized some songs by playing them repeatedly. There was no MTV and hence we didn’t know the basics of dancing/swaying on stage or using smoke generators. We played only cover versions but had one number, which we composed and told no one that it was ours. It was the unthinkable then. A far cry from today when playing cover versions is supposed to be the vocation of bands playing in Hotels. We stood right up there on stage, stiffly, playing music and occasionally winning compliments, prizes and appreciation. But it was great while it lasted. We knew there was no career in it. Some of us were so passionate enough about music to want to make playing in Hotels/ restaurants a career. I had entertained visions of working on a regular job during the day and playing music in the night wearing a wig so that no one would recognize me.
I recall many small things from those days- Of how one of us was Korak (a nickname) was better looking than the rest of us. He did get the eyes of all the women….and we envied him but were deficient in looks. Of how Anand, certainly the most talented one of the lot, who was more interested in impressing the girls than making good music. Of how Ramki, probably the most passionate about music, had briefly become addicted to grass. Now it all seems so distant and oh so silly.
Today we are all in regular jobs, running families, leading staid and boring lives. Our kids are grown up and are on the threshold of doing college and I often wonder whether any of them would inherit the passion if not the music. I suppose they have too many distractions around them and it would be difficult to focus on anything in a sustained manner.
I still recollect vividly how it ended. We were so intense about our music and had ground rules for practice sessions. Everyone turns up in time for some solid practice and we immensely enjoyed these sessions. The drum rolls were perfected, guitar licking fine-tuned and the vocal harmony put to test. The drummer, incidentally the youngest guy in the band, failed to turn for practice twice before the University Arts Festival. It was the big day for which we had been practicing for many months. We fired him & went on stage without him. The show was a disaster and we lost. I put the guitar down and never touched it again. The band False Alarm continued in various avatars with different artists for some more time and wound up one day. Heard about a hot new guitarist who joined the band briefly and made it very lead guitar centric with very little attention to vocals.
Years later, twenty five years later, to be precise, my friend who still runs a small business in Palakkad, told me this story about a reminder of False Alarm. He had gone for a temple festival. He over heard a bald guy pointing him out to his grown up daughter and telling her how False Alarm used to play music in college days & how listening to our performances kindled his interst in music of the western kind.