Soundscapes and Textscapes

So, I am reflecting on language. This is prompted by the rash of Spotify shares that everyone is doing on Insta stories. Essentially, Spotify is updating everyone with metrics on the top artistes and songs they spent the most time on through the year. I don’t use Spotify, so I did my own stock taking of what I had listened to. But, that apart, a friend’s Spotify list is what prompted this reflection. She had a list of artistes and songs I had never heard of – they were all foreign singers and English songs and for a brief moment I went back to my teens when the pressure to be cool and fit in necessarily meant being up to date with English pop music. In high school, this pressure was mostly over Mysterious Girl and that song caused me a lot of grief one summer because I was on the periphery of this group of girls from St Mary’s and they were such snobs about this music.

It took me many years to become comfortable and own the music that I liked – which was mostly Hindi film music/South Asian music. I owe a lot to academic scholarship on Hindi cinema that allowed me to see that aesthetics that were dismissive of non-English art were oppressive hierarchies in their own way. While teenhood is rarely smooth for anyone, that I would feel shy about owning my tastes in public even in early adulthood was a little problematic because I was not fully aware about the politics of culture and more so popular culture. Reading scholarship helped me not only understand this, but also see how tremendous an art form the average Hindi film song is and why it is celebrated and continues to this day.

How deeply remembered this sense of uncoolness is, was bought home to me when I felt momentarily judged as I wondered what this friend must think of the kind of music I share on Instagram. I quickly took a screenshot of her list and have been exploring the songs she listened to and didn’t really take to any of them. For one, I did not understand anything they were singing. This is also the problem I face with Tamil film music, where I have to labor and work to understand the lyrics and their meanings. I know that the more I do it, the easier it will become, but given that I am working and writing while listening, I cannot break focus to chase down the meanings of words and songs and so my Tamil music listening suffers. Which is not the case with Marathi songs even because while I don’t understand every word in Marathi, I understand it more and it also has shared similarities with Hindi and words from Persian that find place in Urdu and Marathi.

Now all of my preferences for songs and their language soundscapes is interesting because when it comes to reading, all my reading is in English. I wouldn’t read in Hindi or Marathi. I tried reading Ramdhari Singh Dinkar’s Rashmi Rathi that narrates Mahabharatha from the point of view of Karna and is considered a canonical classic in Hindi literature and made poor progress on it. So, English is the language I am most comfortable reading in even when it is about things closest to my heart about Indian and South Asian subjects. The same applies to writing. I will never be able to write with even half the eloquence in Hindi no matter how much Hindi based media I consume. My personal expression will always be best rendered in English.

However, when it comes to hearing, I prefer native languages. It is the language of my heart and soul. What I feel best captures my sense of being. Now to express that sense of being, the language that I personally can do best in is English. It is a quite tripolar, this sense of consumption and expression with linguistic differences in hearing, reading, and writing. What works well in one language does not work very well in the same language for other purposes. I do listen to the occasional English pop culture song and have a particular liking for country music because I enjoy the instruments they use there. But, my very edgy friend who is uber cool and does uber cool things momentarily took me back with the feeling of English music = cool and the rest is uncool.

Anyway, I pulled back from this sense of uncoolness and feeling judged although nobody made me feel uncool or judged me. It is just a deeply ingrained memory from childhood and also general colonial hangover well that translates into different ways in post colonial cultural consumption.

I have taken off on a old Hindi film songs trip this morning. The lines playing as I wrote this:

In zulfon main gundhenge hum phool mohabbat ke
Zulfon ko jhatak kar ham ye phool gira de to

Lyrics: Sahir Ludhianvi
Music: S.D. Burman
Singers: Geeta Dutt and Mohammed Rafi

Rashtrabhasha

I got out of Rashtrabhasha in school for a reason that I now feel is so flimsy, how did they let me get away with it? My reason was that “I have to eat lunch with my sister in primary school because we get one dabba.” And that was it. I was allowed to skip Rashtrabhasha for every year it was compulsory. You will ask what is the connection between eating lunch and Rashtrabhasha?

Well, the connection is that Indian schools do not respect any leisure time for children and any free time for non-teaching activities such as games and PT periods or zero hour were regularly encroached by teachers seeking to finish their portions. Is it any wonder that we are a nation that neither values sports nor values downtime for children and adults alike? Have things changed in schools now with fancy new age curriculum ideas that seek to ‘unteach’ making their entries?

Okay, so Rashtrabhasha classes would happen during lunch time. The school would give a 15 minutes break for lunch post which you were expected to be back for class. The only people who got away were girls who went home for lunch because they wouldn’t be able to be back in 15 minutes from their homes. And weirdos like me with younger siblings who were in danger of going hungry because of a slightly delayed lunch time between the primary section and mine.

What a freaky excuse that was. The solution could have obviously been very simple. Your sibling and you should get separate lunch boxes. Somehow, no teacher insisted on it. I don’t know why. And I would have rather dearly clung to ‘my sibling will go hungry’ excuse than have suggested it myself.  In any case, I am very thankful I escaped Rashtrabhasha. I have no idea what I did in the free time I had given that the rest of the class had to slog it away in the break. God alone knows how I spent that time.

So, I am talking about Rashtrabhasha because my classmate Megha’s feature film is currently streaming and trending in the top 10 on Netflix and opens with a teen bunking a Rashtrabhasha kind of scholarship exam. Megha was my classmate at the University of Pune and vibrated at a different frequency than everyone else. Go and watch her lovely little film, which is called “What are the Odds?” There is a lot of Megha growing up in Pune in the film. I would have linked it here, but Netflix is not permitting WordPress to do so. You will not regret watching it.

Enjoy.

 

Finding poetry

I waited for poetry today, but it did not come my way so I went looking for it, but returned empty handed all the same. This is the proper words waala poetry, not the metaphoric kind of poetry that one finds in random moments. I am in dire need of poetry in the traditional sense of the term right now, but since it refuses to happen, I can only surmise that perhaps, sometimes, unless you already acknowledge the poetry that a short while ago, had enveloped you in its profoundness, newer verses may not find their way to you. So, this is an attempt to remedy that.

In an earlier post, I had written about listening to Mann kasturi re while reading the lyrics of the song. It is by far the most well written song for me from this year. What I did not write about at that time was another line that wasn’t part of any of the songs in Masaan, but which I found thanks to the film. I had at that time turned the lines over and over in my head marveling at the sheer force of its thought and how sometimes I too have taken a leap of faith based on nothing more than audacious optimism. I wish these lines had been there with me in those moments, it would have made those leaps far less terrifying. These lines are by Dushyant Kumar. I found them here and they said,

Kaun kehta hai ke aasmaan main suraakh ho nahin sakta,
ek patthar toh tabiyyat se ucchhalo yaaron.

Even if the ideas are common, poetic thoughts in languages other than English often resonate and appeal to me more simply because it is not the language of my everyday. I hold on to them and remember them for long after so much so that I can recite them verbatim – something that does not happen to me with thoughts that are expressed in English which is the language I am most fluent in be it reading, writing, or speech. The very nature of the ‘foreignness’ of languages like Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi and the unexpected contexts of encountering them are personally valuable to me because I wouldn’t know where to go looking for them if the onus were on me to find them because I don’t know enough about the tongue. So sometimes, when I do meet these verses, I find myself more vulnerable to their messages and what they have to say. Not only do I not know the first thing about poetry, I am also not interested enough in poetry to pick up a book of verses and read by myself. Hence, whenever poetry happens to me, I feel like these fleeting encounters that I have with verses in the midst of my prosaic life embody what the true essence of poetry anyway is – to create small embroidered pockets of restfulness that are threaded together by the prettiest combination of thoughts and words to usher in meaning that lights up your heart. It is why I love Hindi film songs so much. Their lyrics set to tunes offer me a short cut to poetic thoughts that I am only too happy to receive.

These lines by Dushyant Kumar have little to do with why I need poetry right now, but I feel I must record and acknowledge this because serendipity sending poetry my way is my only hope and perhaps this will appease whoever is in charge of these things.

P.S. I find my school education a tragic waste of my time. While it equipped me with the rudimentary basics of literacy, there seems to have been much that I missed out on. Chief of which is a rather underwhelming experience of learning about both Hindi and Marathi literature that were the regional languages I learnt in school. Why weren’t we introduced to thoughts such as these that occurred to poets like Dushyant Kumar? Why, after spending grades I-X studying Marathi and grades V-X studying Hindi can I not even think of blogging in any of these languages? I made a last ditch attempt to learn to read and write Tamil in my last five months in the United States and am semi-literate in my mother tongue now, but that is all. I spent three months learning to read and write Kannada when I moved to Bangalore, but I have forgotten much of that too because I did not keep up with practice and the alphabets are back to being squiggles that confuse me in my attempts to distinguish one from another. What a waste of time spent in school. So much so for coming from a country that boasts of linguistic diversity.

P.P.S. There are a couple of lines from my grade X Marathi text book which are the only ones I ever remember and something that I will never forget because the story of Phulvedya Mai (A lady who was mad about flowers) had a question as poetic as this – “Yevdhushya mannala jhapaycha tari kiti?” This heart so little; how much can one control its desires?
Another line in this story went – “Vede vha, vha thode vede. Nehmi shahane rahnyat, kai shahanpan aahe?”  Be mad. Be a little mad. What is the wisdom in always being so wise?

Touche. Poetry.