Missing something

Sorry about this long interlude. It is so cold out here. The temperature often dips to the minus zero ranges. These are days when one wants to curl up and read. Imagination freezes and one long for the sunshine and warmth of home country. Reports of fallen girders, monsoon failure, power cuts and water shortages fail to douse my enthusiasm for home.

I have been requested by a dear friend to write about MJ. My musical tastes have always followed a two- generation lag. I listened to most of my music in the eighties. We were not so clued in on Bee Gees & K C & the Sunshine Band. Instead, the music of Beatles, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd & Simon & Garfunkel which belonged to an earlier generation filled our lives. When Michael Jackson broke into the scene, we thought he appealed to callow youth whose musical tastes weren’t as refined as ours was (sounds pretty arrogant, I know). Don’t blame us if we found white socks, shiny pants, wavy hair and moonwalk a bit crude. Over the years, I consistently made serious efforts to plug myself in on to contemporary music. Savage Garden, Green Day, Metallica and Linkin Park are all bands I discovered along the way. But Michael Jackson passed me by without making an impact. Billie Jean was probably the only song which got my attention. But he inspired a whole generation as the obituaries would reveal. Maybe I missed something there.

But then one shouldn’t sneer at musical phases spanning generations. When four boys from Liverpool with funny haircuts started singing silly love songs, many sneered at them. Today, when I look back I really don’t think they were great, musically, I mean. But then songs like Norwegian Wood were anthems of our youth- although our youth happened much after Beatles ended their music. Contemporary music in the eighties reached the shores of India pretty late. In the nineties, the lag almost disappeared. My son listens to the latest that releases in the west.

Simon & Garfunkel are touring Australia. Tickets are priced too high. Sounds familiar. A couple of old men who sang for the young and passionate working-class during their heydays are squeezing out the last ounce of moolah from their musical careers. The music that inspired a whole generation is being flogged for all it is worth. And the working class boys in tattered jeans who grew up listening to them are now in suits and don’t think twice about paying a few hundred dollars for a peek at their icons. I consider the “Boxer” as one of the greatest songs of all times. I must have seen their DVD of the reunion concert in Central Park a hundred times. But no way am I paying a hundred plus dollars from my pitiful allowances to see them live. I could claim to my grandchildren that I saw them with my own eyes. But my grandchildren wouldn’t know who they were anyway…

********************************

I am constantly accosted with questions on India’s defence prowess and the growing economic might. There are dedicated Indophiles in Australia. I evade these questions for one simple reason. For the large majority of us, becoming a super power doesn’t mean much. We’d rather see hunger and poverty eliminated from our land, our streets freed of crime, our rivers banks not stripped of sands, our forests pristine and green, our atmosphere filled with clean air to breathe, affordable power available round the clock, drinking water and education provided to all, and our youth gainfully employed. If economic might is a precondition for achieving all that, so be it. We certainly wouldn’t want a few tycoons and MBAs wallowing in wealth while the large majority tries to eke out a miserable existence.

And India’s defence prowess, did someone say? It is a bit too complex. Not a subject I would like to write about in a blog. While we have many fine Officers in the Armed Forces and several fine technocrats in our Military Industrial complex, these guys are often caught in the nitty gritty of troublesome daily existence. Higher defence management and superpower pretensions are left to those in the seminar circuits and media talk shops. I advise them to catch hold of someone in the leisure class to talk about these high fangled things.