Friday, September 30, 2005

disturbing the silence

We let silence fill the gaps
After words have been said,
The truth is in the spaces,
Once our voices leave our heads.

There’s music in the silence
If you stop to listen still,
In the space where words aren’t spoken,
Where there’s a mind with a will.

But I speak as I do,
Disturbing the silence yet,
Comprehending it all,
And not understanding any of it.


August / September 2005

Monday, September 05, 2005

india music

The casual listener from overseas will probably know the music in our country from the great classical traditions - hindustani and carnatic. those in the uk will know of bhangra rap and its ilk, and those from asian, east european and african parts will be familiar with the canned music from the huge indigenous film industry. the more knowledgeable and of course seriously interested will have heard the folk music especially the baul music of bengal. what many don't know is that there's a largely ignored but select population of musicians who are doing stuff that may be considered "western" but is truly original, talented and music that eventually makes great listening! very few of them are able to come out with recordings since the typical commercially minded music industry doesn't know its arse from its face. though some of them have been lucky once, like 'skinny alley' from calcutta, to get released by virgin. but that wasn't their greatest album anyway and i think they've got better stuff coming... however if any of you are ever in india check out HFT from delhi - they have a website - hftmusic.com - and you can download their music. they are a killer trio doing non-vocal music that is undefinable but immensely enjoyable. there's rudy wallang's band from shillong in meghalaya - i think they're called 'soulmate' - blues, rnb, soul... there are many others. there has recently been a spate of bangla bands - musicians singing very rock and folk oriented songs with bangla lyrics, something that originated in bangladesh but that is quite trite and amateurish if i want to be nice to them. luckily there are a small number trying to make amends and remedy that by doing some very serious music which doesn't copy completely but is influenced and inspired. know what i mean? unfortunately googling or other searches give you a lot of crappy info about modern music in india. maybe i should start one myself? anyone willing to help out?

Edited 09jul06 to correct HFT's link.

Saturday, August 13, 2005

Is there hope still?

Cleverness is acquired, intelligence is attained. But what the hell, does anyone give a damn? A degree from a college seems to be the level of "intelligence" anyone aspires to. Having thus acquired the qualification that they have merely paid for and not really studied for, a job is the next factor to be considered. Once obtained, a level of cleverness is attained. This cleverness is gained from watching others more experienced make mistakes repeatedly, listen to others make excuses that justify a lack of work ethics, and emulate others who, due to a lack of any constructive work, sit around and politic, and try to hamper good work from getting done.

This then makes one clever, better suited to handle today's competitive, career-oriented lifestyle. These are the majority who will in some way or the other rule destinies, strongly influence collective decisions of economic, political, military and social significance in the not too distant future.

Is there hope still?

In Life

In life’s passageways, unable to see the other side, I wander, bereft of ambition, yet full of hope, searching for that elusive something that will lead me to know that it has all been worthwhile after all.

Clever words, jaunty phrases juxtaposed into unending sentences are never going to get me there, but I think they may be bridges between real time and sometime. I travel on…

When you are searching, you will inevitably turn up things never meant to be found. They are discoveries best left behind closed doors. I search for peace and I find a war of words that shatters the silence. Dreams are myths I create. Nightmares and rancid thoughts take over my very existence.

The will to be constructive, to be a person who thinks and acts, is practical wisdom. Real life weaves in roadblocks, obsolescence, negative attitudes to stop you from attaining that which you work for, work towards.

Nevertheless, the search continues. I may trudge, occasionally trot, often run, and my holy grail is that much more distant, more perplexing, and soon a figment of a stressful imagination.

I put myself into some perspective. Address my issues in the third person singular; look from on top at my life going on below, like a near-death experience. If I can see the after-life, why is it I cannot perceive the now?

Nations might disappear at the flick of Presidential switches. Planets implode when some cosmic switch is thrown. I disappear when I want to. What mechanism makes me vanish? My body feels a material loss, a deprivation of comforts known, and a lack of tangibility. My mind expands to fill these voids, this vacuum created by not having the familiar to touch, smell, eat, drink, love…

Hiding away, yet remaining at least remotely accessible creates a sense of security, of being cocooned in a muslin mosquito net. Within this pre-fabricated shell of alienation, of intentional withdrawal, I seek redemption in words.

OUT HERE

In this place night settles like molasses, no, jaggery, like gur. Like it treacles out of your parantha, so it drips down the sides of the rocky hillocks that surround the village. There is a power cut and the effect is acute. Now I know what is meant by "a sky carpeted with stars". The crescent moon lends the air a chilliness that heralds winter.

Yet below this celestial scenery, below the boulder strewn hillocks that seem to be outlined by a phosphorescent halo, perhaps of sun-baked rock and earth reflecting the moonlight, you know that not everything is as beautiful or magical.

Nights like these can be magic in the city.

As a travelling salesman for one of India’s largest selling periodicals I often wondered what it would be like to go off down the side roads of the main highways. Who lives here? What happens there? Idle thoughts of someone contented, paid handsomely, travelling in comfort provided by a generous tour allowance, as I zipped down the tarmac with hours to kill before my next sale.

The simile to jaggery may be apt for the night, but the truth is that no jaggery is available here. If it is, it comes from elsewhere and is usually not affordable by people who face drought because of no rain and a loss of income from too much rain. Between the devil and the deep blue sea. From the frying pan into the fire. There are so many similes for trouble in the English language.

This is the most backward district in the state. It is officially acknowledged that a large percentage lives below the official poverty line, the BPL. Poverty is a strong term in bureaucracy’s officialese. It is a good statistic and an index of how rich the rest of the country is. Percentages can make forcible statements.

Out here percentages mean nothing. The value of a percentile figure means the amount the villager repays the loan shark every month for the rest of his life, and if unfortunate enough to be deeply in debt, the rest of his children’s lifetimes. So that they can survive. Subsist. A slight percentage above mere existence.

Out here the meteorological survey’s percentage-of-rainfall statistics for the year mean that there will be less rain so it’s likely that the village will starve and be forced to migrate. Or the percentage could mean that there will be extraordinary rain, and good cash crops ruined because the skies will weep for the sad plight of the unfortunate people. The truth is that out here there has been no rain in the last twelve years.

Out here poverty is a figure in a nationwide census, in a United Nations handbook, in a World Bank presentation, in an election manifesto masquerading as a government campaign.

Out here I sit wondering about it all. I have willy-nilly become part of an NGO that takes sustainable development, and not charity, very seriously, and in the same spirit initiates and monitors the results of this work. Out here percentages don’t work. Splitting hairs is just that – hair splitting.

Social issues arise because they involve humans. Humans tend to make a mess of themselves, generally speaking. More so, humans lean towards making a mess for others. But not everyone. Some want to clean up the mess and others want to assist in the cleaning up.

Out here life has no clear-cut meanings. It is not an organised mess as it might be in urban centres. Out here life is a mess. You either take control the best you can or you become just another statistic. Another famine victim. Another penurious death. The sins of our forefathers weigh heavily on our souls.

Out here, when verdant pastures, lush vegetation, yellow fields of sunflowers dotted in black flash past as you drive by, the truth is, that out here, fallow land lies behind the picturesque scenery. Down the side roads never repaired since they were built. Off these roads, into unmetalled village roads, tracked by bullock-cart wheels and ploughshares. Out here is village India where the farmer sells his produce at a price fixed by someone he doesn’t know, will never see. Out here in gramin Bharat where the farmer buys at rates he can have no negotiation with. Out here where nature can be as bountiful as she is willful in her destruction.

I wonder where we are out here. Because out here is like no other place I know. Out here is wonder and beauty. Out here is the backbone of our country. Out here is extreme poverty aided by incompetence, by selfish disposition, by ignorance, by disease. Out here is as unreal as it is true.

I pass judgement. But who am I to do so? I too am another statistic. I can feel pity but they don’t need it. I can empathize but they can do without it. I can contribute but it is miniscule compared to their needs. I can justify it all so glibly.

This was written in late November 1998 while I was visiting a project of the NGO SAMUHA in Raichur district of north Karnataka. I have since learned that the village I spent the night in has finally got a public telephone. This was a collective decision taken by the village panchayat, which has an equal representation of men and women from every street in the village. The entire village must mutually agree and even one dissenting voice is considered significant enough to either delay, or cancel something that may ostensibly be for the benefit of the entire village. Majority votes have no use in their community.
(First published in The Statesman, Calcutta, Sunday Miscellany, August 1999)

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

The Bleeper
A modern day fable - by Patrick Sanjiv Lal Ghose

To adapt a popular jazz song from the bebop era, “He bleeped when he should have bopped”.

Do you know the word that is used to describe the short, high sound that replaces a spoken word or words when it is, or they are, subjected to censorship and expunged from the sound track of a film or television program? Or even a song? BLEEP! You know it? I thought you did.

Well, this is about people who expunge themselves from life as you know it. No, they don’t die. They simply remove themselves, their entire beings, from life. BLEEP. Hence, bleepers. One moment, there they are! The next moment, where are they?

At this early stage in my narrative I will understand if a feeling of utter disbelief is beginning to overtake you, when you want to question not merely the validity of my statement, but my very sanity itself. Well, willingly suspend that disbelief as you might for the poets, and listen to what I have to tell you. You never know, you might be a bleeper yourself.

Sometime in your life you would have read, or heard of persons who disappear without a trace. Of these many million incidents, some recorded and officially enquired into, most unrecorded; twenty five percent would be suicides, fifteen percent those who run away to another place, another country for reasons criminal or personal, ten percent those who are being protected by the authorities for usually political or military reasons, still leaving you with fifty percent. Fifty percent who have completely and totally vanished!

Take it from me, those are the bleepers. They have willfully bleeped themselves out of this existence.

You never know it the first time. The realisation dawns many, many years later, and for want of a better word, I choose to call it bleeping. Tell me, how often have you thought: I wish I was elsewhere, doing something else, with someone else? How I wish I could live a different life, perhaps in a different time altogether? Am I right? Are these not thoughts which have run through your imagination at some time in your life? Many have attempted to achieve such an ambition by changing horses midstream, so to speak, but they have continued to live in this life of the here and now.

I am talking about not even being in the here and now, in this present existence, this current life. I am talking about simply vaporising into thin air, without undergoing some horrible or tragic death, and appearing at a time and place of your choosing to be what you think you want to be.

Let me illustrate.

In this life you are a salesperson in a firm that provides information technology solutions. After having spent some fifteen to eighteen years of your life getting an education, being technically qualified and pumped up with purpose and ambition, you have landed a well-paid job with excellent scope for growth selling a solution, when what you are better qualified to do is to engineer that solution.

Nevertheless, your initial reaction is ecstatic. The pay is good and the prospects so bright (that you’ve got to wear shades – Ray Ban no less!), that you even marry your sweetheart, buy a car, move to a bigger house and have a baby or more. A few years down the line and everything is so meaningless, so mundane, so…so sad. Music is your only consolation. You listen to your favourite songs whenever, wherever you can. The home theatre system you replaced your obsolete 5-in-1 with, has been replaced with the state-of-the-art car stereo. The iPod has gradually begun to assume first priority in your interest levels so that your music listening benefits from a superior technological experience. You seek out friends who are musicians, preferably of calibre, of taste, of aesthetic advancement. Yet there’s a part missing in all this. You search for this missing piece in the music you listen to. Your work and your job are routine as is your family life, and they offer you nothing when you start searching.

You narrow your search down to the music you hear, and you begin to focus on a certain genre that has remained a constant source of pleasure, of consolation, of satisfaction. Let’s say it is jazz. You have graduated in stages in your listening to this form of music. From the old New Orleans style, to bebop, cool, mainstream, modern, avant garde, to contemporary, fusion, acid, hip-hop, it’s been a roller coaster ride of sheer musical pleasure. Today’s global sounds have infused the jazz you love with strange yet exciting voices, rhythms and melodies. Ideas of what might be, what can be are spilling over from your imagination. Your knowledge base has widened beyond the normal listeners’ ken. You can relate to musicians talking amongst themselves when they do a postmortem of a concert they’ve just played, or a composition they’ve begun. Their ideas mesh with yours, kick off new ideas in your head. But you still don’t know how to play an instrument, or even sing one blessed, tuneful note. For reasons best known to you, you did not continue with those piano lessons in school, or learn the guitar when your best friend did. Today, it is your fashion statement when you tell some bored and drunken listener at an office party that your one regret in life is that you cannot play a musical instrument. Cheers to that, and let’s have another one, do!

Your listening to music is now accompanied by your extraordinary performance in thin air. Your fingers run over an imaginary keyboard, plucking out those notes just like Monk did, even filling in spaces with your own notes and chords. That figmentive saxophone is lovingly caressed in your hands as you copy bar for bar what Bird is blowing through the earphones of your iPod. And it hits you like a grand piano crushing your skull at the end of a ten-storey fall that this is what you were meant to be doing after all.

You were meant to be a jazz musician. Even better, an enormously successful musician in India, where the rich classical and folk idioms can so add to the new jazz that is in your head. You know for a fact that jazz is the only living, breathing, real music there is. It is the melting pot and what melts in it. It is music to live for, a sound to die for. Beyond this you know nothing else. Information technology solutions are the crassness of the human soul. There is no purity there; no magic, no pulsating organism; just digits, inorganic, binary coded non-matter. You further realise that this family you have purposefully put together, your spouse, your offspring, the obvious signs of social standing, are the totem poles of a tottering trauma that lie like an undertow in a monsoon-fattened river, ready to pull you down, drown you.

Music, that is jazz, is your only escape, your only release. You want a life where you can play jazz always. But at forty seven? Is it possible? To go through another thirty years of merely imbibing, imitating and regurgitating the greats, till you at last arrive in your own, carve your niche? Where is the time? The money? The circumstances? And you deeply, sincerely, almost religiously wish that you were a jazz musician, born in a family of musicians, learning from all those musicians you respect and worship, till you at last have the ability, confidence, training and the requisite standard of creativity to play your own music. And earn some respect and accolades yourself. That’s important to your wish too.

BLEEP! Your wish has been granted. You suddenly realise, or more correctly become aware, that you are six years old; standing beside an old battered piano being sweetly played by a dark, curly-headed man you unwittingly know is your father. Another jolly looking man, his cheeks puffed out with his blowing, eyes popping as he coaxes out a mean piece from the cornet he is gripping along with a handkerchief, stands alongside. And you know, somehow or the other, that Satchmo is your father’s friend.

Elation knows no bounds. And you also know that your prior life, the one before, is still part of your consciousness. This is what you had wanted. Again for reasons best known to yourself you decide not to share this revelation with your present family. So you grow, you train, you inculcate, you are influenced by the great ones, the musicians you had idolized then, and continue to worship now. Over the years you find your place in the sun that shines on the jazz world, your footprints embedded on the blue moon that so inspires you and your ilk.

But you always know you are from the future, from India, another country, another mélange of cultures. You had been an information technology solutions provider then, and now you are a jazz musician in an age when the language of Trane’s horn is all the information you need, and the way Dizzy uses that mute all the technology you want. And the solution to it all is when you hear Mingus and gang do their thing.

Because you had on that first occasion wished yourself into this day and age, this space and time, you have now grown into an icon of jazz in the era of Information Technology. Techies freely offer you their feats of micro-engineering, their end results of using technology to beget even more sophisticated technology. And you allow your music to adapt to this new environment, to find meaning in the alphanumeric mumbo-jumbo, where electricity, digitisation and the things you can do with them are as crazy, if not more so, than the mind altering substances you took before to find that lost chord, that perfect piece of music.

Then again you come to the realisation that perhaps this is not what you want, this technological marvellousness, this precise mathematical computation, permutation and combination of your music which emanates from your soul, is the beloved child of your muse. And you seek. You search once more. This time the search returns you to India, the land of your previous birth, the one you are still conscious of. Many things have faded. The previous family are wisps of smoke, nameless, faceless; a life that was. Yet you remember the one thing you do – your passionate desire to be a jazz musician. Because that’s when you bleeped.

Once more, at this juncture of my telling, you find yourself unwilling to suspend disbelief any longer, and damn the poets! Your credulousness is turning in, and feelings of doing violence to this writer are overwhelming you. But I say hold a while! Don’t you want to know if you are a bleeper? Don’t you wish you were one? I’m quite positive you do. Shall I tell you why? Because you too have such desires. You too wish you were in another life, that you were someone else doing something else. And how do I know? Aah, that’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?

Well, it’s like this then. That tale I just recounted? That jazz musician’s soul hiding inside an IT solutions salesperson’s body? Truth to tell, that’s me. Yes, me. And now whether you believe it or not, it’s the whole truth and nothing but. So, you might as well hear the rest of it, the last of it.

A pretty, astute young sub-editor flirted with me at a party in Mumbai where I had just finished guest playing a small set with a local jazz band. The musicians knew me only as an American jazz player who was quite something. They were unaware of my reputation or fame, nor did I say anything to enlighten them, enjoying this wary yet free moment of being incognito. But the sub-editor, though young, was a true jazz aficionado, and had recognised me. She dug around in the host’s collection and found an album of mine. You might recall, for a while then, I was hot property on the Page 3s of all the newspapers. Learning that I had come to India for good had resulted in sponsors suddenly taking up cudgels for jazz. In a snowballing effect, and as you can witness for yourself, jazz has become the flavour of the day for film music, pop music, and the varied urban music of India. Record companies, never slack when it comes to sniffing out instant profits, have released more jazz recordings into the Indian market in one year than they have ever released in the West in the last millennium. I’m sort of glad to say many of those recordings are mine.

That sub-editor, now promoted to Senior Features Editor, approached me to write a three-part series of articles for her publication on my music, my roots, my influences, my life. If you are still reading this, then you have in all likelihood read the other two pieces that have already been published in this periodical you hold. Those two articles give the publisher what he wanted. This one tells the whole truth.

I bleeped once without knowing it and look where I am! I have in these two conscious lifetimes understood what I want from my existence here on this earth. I want music, more specifically jazz, to replace the blood in my veins. It is said the conscious decisions you make now determine the trend your life takes. This is my conscious decision. I wish to go further, deeper into the music and I am quickly losing patience. In fifty years from now, technology, and indeed the very nature of music will have changed. I want to be there then. Now. I wish to be part of that change, that revolution today.

Remember not everyone will be a bleeper, but anyone can try. If you want something really, truly, badly enough, and if you wish for it in your heart, with all your mind and spirit, you too could be a bleeper.

Till then, bleep! bleep! See you whenever I do.
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Editor’s Note: The mortal remains of the author have never been found. The combined efforts of Indian and US investigating agencies to do so have been in vain. However the author’s claimed antecedents bear out from what we have been able to verify and does include two families in two countries who have a mysteriously missing relative. Recording companies of course, are releasing previously unreleased material by the author-musician, reissuing old titles, repackaging them and making a killing. We are not doing too badly ourselves. Look out for our upcoming series of investigative articles on the bleeping phenomenon. May the author-musician bleep in peace!