Music and me
The earliest thing I consciously remember about music was that I hated it. Well, not exactly hated.. But it drove me nuts and I had decided to keep it away from me at all costs. I suppose Freud would have correctly analyzed that this surprising dislike for all kinds of music originated from the fact that I was woken up every morning by the sound of music. No, not the Julie Andrews starrer, but the agonizing noise produced by twerps in the Hindi movie industry and blared by the twerps in the radio station into my bedroom. That’s how my father woke me up. He would simply turn up the volume on the radio. A very effective strategy now that I think about it. Needless to say, my parents were very disappointed with the situation. Both my parents loved music. My mom was a good guitar player (not the electric one) and also a good singer. My Dad loved to hear music all the time, no matter what he was doing. In fact, the thing that most of his batchmates at IIMA remembered him by was that he used to carry around a transistor radio with him all the time. Anyway, they left it at that. Then something else happened which caused me to hate music even more.
I became a student of the Smt. Sulochnadevi Singhania School, Thane. Apart from this long, impossible to remember (for non-Sulonians) name, my alma mater boasted of a system wherein every student from classes 1st to 6th was subjected to, erm.. Given the opportunity to learn music from, a music teacher. There was a music teacher for classes 1st to 2nd and another for classes 3rd to 6th.
I simply couldn’t memorize anything. It was completely unnatural for me. Also, I had a morbid fear of attention and tried to avoid it as much as I could. Therefore, I dreaded every music class because one never knew, when one could get called upon to sing a song in front of the whole class. I would even forget what little I did remember. I remember once I was asked to sing the school song and I forgot half the words! So as always, I did what best I could do to salvage the situation. I hummed the tune and thought up words on the fly. My senior music teacher was so amazed by this that he christened me ‘Anu Malik’ (a Bollywood music director who was perennially accused to lifting tunes from other people’s songs and fitting his own lyrics into them. The name didn’t catch on much.. eh?!) Thankfully, he was also mollified enough to give me a passing grade each year.
Then, suddenly, I don’t know how I suddenly started liking music. This was around class 7 - right after I left music class, yeah! hmmm… I listened to it all the time. I didn’t understand rock, etc but I loved Hindi music. My parents were delighted.
Fast forward a few years, and I came to IIIT. By then I had graduated from childish Hindi songs, through fast Hindi dance music, to English boy/girl bands… I remember during ragging, Deepak Ahuja (he was three years senior to me) asked me what kind of music I liked. When he heard my answer, he asked me whether I enjoyed watching them or listening to them. I agreed that I really did enjoy only watching them… What could one expect, I had not heard a lot of music without watching the video.
Then I got allotted a computer in a lab and plugged in my headphones and I discovered the real joy of just listening to music as if for the first time. After I bought a computer, I really discovered music. Rock, metal, RnB, western classical, jazz, pop, hip hop, trance music.. All drifted around me and collided to form one intoxicating mixture. I had liked a few songs of Fatboy Slim when I was at school, but didn’t take the initiative to dig more… Then when I heard all the songs, it was like being in heaven. I had heard ‘the wall’ but didn’t know anything about Pink Floyd till I came here. Today, I love so many kinds of music - I can’t even begin to classify. Most of the time, I like songs with poetry in them and/or which have a fast beat and/or something else entirely.. Can’t really say what I dig exactly… Just that I dig music!
