Destructive Distillation

There isn’t anyone who can be unmoved by the power of music. It is inherent in the universe and our nature. Music is an art, a treat for the ears. It has an immense power of changing our moods and connecting to our psyche.

Living in movie (musicals) crazy country you cant be untouched by the power of music. As everyone else my initiation into music was through the movies and captivator in chief was AR Rehman right from the time Roja happened. The big jump into the world of music I say did occur due to peer pressure and MTV. The bigger picture of world music dawned. As I entered into my teens the beauty of language became clearer and the power it wielded with harmonized sounds took me over. I was hooked onto music and my gradual ascension from Indian music to the World music too place through doors of what now seems a trivial genre called pop. The guys from Backstreet Boys, Westlife and Boyzone seemed the coolest. Ricky Martin was a demi-god. Celine Dion and Shakira were fantasized. Music was the best means to have a good time. I would spend hours at stretch listening to music. My parents were worried and partly surprised at the new turn I took.

At the peak when I was doing an average of 10 hours a day. Music was an addiction like drugs. I always wanted more and everything else was shut out when I was deeply immersed. I needed a new shot often. Music played non stop. Bands like Coldplay, U2, Pink Floyd, Iron Maiden and Radiohead among many others performed for me every day in their liveliest spirit. And suddenly music tipped over and paved way for movies. I still listened to music and it still had the same grip but addiction was a passé. The bandwidth narrowed and I was involuntarily restrained to a limited number of acts. Coldplay and Radiohead made thicker inroads into me as I delved deeper into them. At around the same time I confirmed my theory of musical dynamism and I knew that this was it. I had found my type of music. My passion narrowed down and everything else became entertainment.

Theory of musical dynamism was a random idea stemmed by observation of musical growth among me and friends. We all started similarly and separately from the filmi music and Indian pop then slowly moved onto International pop. Everyone was crazy about Ricky Martin after the ‘98 World cup. The boy bands and the divas attracted giving more in their songs. We were then listening to soft rock acts like Sting and Bryan Adams before Linkin Park came around and vented our inner feelings and teenage frustrations. Soon the classic rock acts like Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden and the psychedelic ones like Pink Floyd and The Doors mesmerized us. Some my friends moved on to metal and into more specific sub genres of metal. But Metal always bounced off my head. For different people the journey ends differently. The journey for me ended at alternative bands like Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails and most importantly piano driven rock like Coldplay and Keane.

My dream of making music might never come true but I keep myself happy with listening to it, discussing it with my friends and writing some songs. Music is special. It means different things to different people. For me it is the never failing tranquilizer and stimulant when required. It is an indispensable and integral part of my life.

We are all unhappy. Yes we are!! In varying degrees i agree, but certainly we are. We all want to be happy and why shouldn’t we be. Somehow that keeps us going, the pursuit of happiness. We hardly acknowledge it and worse; not make a conscious effort to work for it. The whole point of living is to be happy and have a good time and at the end of the day kick the bucket satisfied.

But somehow, inexplicably we cant be happy being happy all the time with no worries. Well we aren’t really happy either. Just those certain things (which trouble us) have been swept under the carpet. We have been programmed to worry, to live the struggle, and untangle the mess. However most of us are really wary of untangling it all. Making life simple is not an easy task but it would be tougher on you if you did. As then you would know all answers and be devastated for not yet being able to solve them. And why cant we solve them? There is always a missing piece, an invisible cog we are unable to find, that when found would unlock bliss. But we are a complacent crowd. We are too lazy to take a step and find the piece. We tend to resign to our fates near the difficult end as easily as we put up a fight when we are pushed to the wall. And we complain a lot when we are somewhere in between.

Happy is what happy get. We can always start a day being happy and go through our daily routine and keep doing what we want to. But we are forced to do something else and call it duty. Our actions determine our feelings and emotions. To have a choice to what we should feel happy or sad, weak or strong etc, we better choose our actions ourselves for the good or for the bad. At the end of the day we all know deep down inside however vehemently we try to deny it no one really knows us like we ourselves do.