IS IT MY SWAN SONG ?

        
          The  much familiar number on my caller-id sent a spasm of euphoria up my nerviest of nerves. Three months of trepidation and butterflies-in-the-stomach state was replaced by a highjump to the 'whoa!'-plane. In those three months I deliberately cogitated and scanned on my musical 'achievements' in the  thirteen years  since I got formally inducted into training for Hindustani vocal classical music. Not that I had never made any such review earlier . But it was more of the perfunctory , superficial variety which imitated to great fidelity, the ostrich-burying-his-head-deep-in-the-bosoms-of-earth proverb. What I am talking about is the mandatory self-analysis as regards my musical yen. During this period, my morale had been vacillating, covering the entire spectrum of moods from extreme exuberance to a down-in-the-doldrums state. Exhilaration, when my 'guru' and teacher would subtly pass a compliment about  my sense of 'ragas' and my ability to pick up arduous 'taans'. And frustration , everytime I reminded myself  'Hey dude, you still can't tell your 'dhaivat' (la) from your 'rishabh' (re)' . And my teacher, being an extremely collected, polite and rather abstemious person, would show her mild irritation by simply asking me (embellished with a chuckle,of course !) 'Is baar riyaaz nahi hua naa ?' This politeness would, more often than not dent my wafer-thin but huge-as-a-balloon sense of achievement. Paradoxically, being a largely self-motivated guy, I would go gung-ho and go in for dauntless 'riyaaz' sessions as if my next inhalation-exhalation cycle depended on it ! This was, of course, much to the chagrin of my pleasant-natured neighbours. They would .of course, put in politically right comments like ' Was it you ? It sounded like a recorded piece !'

          Getting back to my 'guru' on matters concerning music , she could be classified as someone belonging to a rare breed of immensely secure people. Someone who could be used as a prototype of the class of people who nurture simplicity but not ordinariness.Hugely talented, an exemplary artiste and amazingly sensitive teacher. And this is certainly a rare combination. I wonder how she remains almost unperturbed under all circumstances. Her very-rarely uttered hints at how her becoming a consummate artiste had not been a cakewalk, gave me a peephole view and a depth of understanding that simplicity could be attained only after traversing through a whole gamut of complexities. Darwin took eaons to hypothesize the Theory of Natural Selection. I took thirteen years to get a hint about the
concept of man's spiritual evolution, if I may be audacious enough to state so  ! The solace, of course, was that I didn't have to land up in Galapagos Islands and strike camaraderie with the
 creepy-crawlies and fork-tongued critters ! Getting back, in spite of being an ace classical singer, 'teacher' would never act as a zealot-like champion of it. Never once, had she derided film music. Her admiration for Kishori Amonkar was on par with her appreciation of Shreya Ghoshal's velvet-like voice or the stupendously sensational scale range of Lata Mangeshkar. This was something out-of-the-box for members of her species. 'Deprived' and 'bereft' of the mercurial mood swings of prodigally talented classical artistes, she rarely lent herself to the session- missing routine.

           I would eagerly await the occasion of 'Guru Poornima' to pay my obeisance to her. Considering the fact that I equate the act of 'Saashtang Namaskar' with the subtle act of pulling the carpet from under the feet of hapless victims, my subscription to the same on this rare occasion would have sent shock waves through the spine of all my near and dear ones (  if they had witnessed the 'holy' act, of course! ).For someone like me, who respects many, irrespective of the number of years they revolved around the sun along with earth, but holds no specific person as a role model, she worked as someone close to one.
 
          Hence, on one of those rare occasions, when , post our singing session, we just got to talking about what continued to push her into imparting music lessons to wannabe singers of all ilk, she mentioned that she had cut down the number of students to a bare minimum. And then, quite uncharacteristically, ( uncharacteristically, thanks to her general sedate persona ! ) she ruminated and than ruefully commented in a far-off-tone ,'These days I have to quench my soul and be happy with busy students ' There was not a hint of patent sarcasm. Being a person who reads between and often beyond lines, it struck a melancholic chord in me, though not immediately. It made me seriously cogitate on my worth as a 'shishya'. This would probably explain my aforesaid mentioned sense of trepidation, which was, of course, proved unjustified by THE telephone call !

          I was elated then. But now, after the euphoria has settled down, I ponder on what kind of longing for an appropriate musical 'heir', would a true-blue musician nurture !







   
          

WEDDING BELLS, ENTREPENEURSHIP AND SLAVERY

     The frenzied delight of the bride could not be dampened by the heady mix of the cosmetic show of my 'euphoric' enthusiasm and, as an antithesis, my feeling of genuine benevolent happiness for the young couple. The bridegroom was, of course, in an inebriated state of soporific somnambulence, thanks to the by-now eternal spell of show of effervescence , vacillating between gleeful grins and uproars of synthetic laughter. At this juncture, at the cost of sounding trite, I repeat two aspects of a much propounded theory. One - men, especially Indian men, love to believe and display that their threshold age for  infectious and enthusiastic youth is pretty much lower than that of the members of the opposite sex. Two - Indian weddings, thanks to their long list of functions shooting off due to the 'globinidianazation' of rituals transcending all parochial demarcations ,leave the poor bridegroom exhausted much before the actual thing begins ! It's a different matter that the bride, in any case, is all perky and pepped up. I have a faint suspicion ,that this is the first bone of contention that the couple has to contend with.

      Well, this  in any case, is not what I wanted to talk about. Sorry about the digression, guys. Lemme focus . Mmm... When I did manage to catch the pretty girl in question, for a few hennaed moments, between the spells of rambunctious and hyperbolic giggles, we got to talking (she talking and I lending my ear !) about the honeymoon itinerary. A trifle moony-eyed, she waxed, if not eloquent, at least with commitment, about the 3 days that she had planned in Bali, following which was a sojourn in Australia and .... And that was it ??? My rhetorical outburst, as if shook her out of her ruminant reverie! She gave me a look that resembled a curious mix of pain caused by the memory of  truncated bliss  and irritation at having had her feet brutally planted on terra firma. As if on the defensive, she snapped," That's the max that I could manage to salvage for myself from my firm." Unfazed , and with a tint of sadistic sarcasm, I added,  "What about all that bit about how much you count at your workplace and how much you are indispensable to your team ?" "I still do count. But there are others, all queued up waiting to be counted. Waiting to fill up the slot " she spat curtly, without adding the 'you moron',of course . As  an epilogue, I added, " So it is yet another case of who needs whom more !" My sardonic best was getting the better of me. Severely cheesed off, she huffed and scurried back to her world of ephemereal euphoria!

      Lest you guys have been let loose in a flummoxed space, wondering what that whole banter was about, I would like to lead you, with firm fingers around your unsure thumbs, to the day when we ( I and 'pretty girl' ) got into a seemingly unending argument. She had just got in as a rookie, fresh after her PGDBM,  at this high-profile stock-broking firm. She had then, with subtle vanity ( if something like that is not an oxymoron !), hinted that she had to deal with a wide range of tasks including derivatives and 'evaluating' them. Much like others of her ilk, in the following meetings, her talks bordered around and then lingered on how much she 'mattered' and how much she felt elated about contributing to the growth of her firm. The long- drawn spells of verbal diarrhoea seemed, at that time to my defensive paranoid state of mind, a sermon on the virtues of linking with an established brand name, a stud-like corporate unit. The cost of being branded a' corporate slave' by 'holier-than-thou oldies' (that remark was added with a sly sideways glance at me! ) , was peanuts compared to the perks.Being a never-say-die champion of entrepeneurship, I bristled up and
not-so-subtly hinted that being one's own lord was not everyone's prerogative. And the pleasure, as well as the responsibility of taking up and owning up one's own decisions ! Not to speak of the pleasures of being on a,  razor's edge doing a tightrope walk ! And the fuel that it adds to you self-efficacy drive, when you think that you can provide livelihoods to all who work with you . And what about the stupendous feeling of exhilaration  you derive when your working unit gets stamped by your looming presence and personality? And if you create your own USP and your own market,rather than scramble for pre-ordained slots in an over-worked market. Wouldn't that be the final coup ?

      But all my ecclesiastical pontification was patronisingly humoured by'pretty girl' then, thanks to her subscription to the exuberance of effervescent and optimistic youth, which periodically 'gets set to conquer the world'! I must admit, that at that juncture,even I got cowed down by it and felt like an inane mumbling-bumbling mambie-jambie ! 

      But today, on this night laid heavy by the iridescence of a hundred twinkling lights and the beats of uncountable remixes, I felt a smug smile escaping my innards and getting trapped in my oral orifice, which lipsynched to 'sweet revenge' !