Music is Life

Music is always, will and must be part of everyone’s life. Everyone’s life revolves in those numerous sounds that we come across. Sounds and tone overlay our entire approach, look and feel of everything we see in our life. In short, music is everywhere and in everything. It’s there in every child’s cry to the slightest of sound escaping through your nostrils… Music makes everything. Music underlay the very tone of a person’s identity…

It’s sometimes not easy to express what we want. Not all of us are great poets or writers who could pepper us and our loved ones with the sheer joy of exotic descriptions but the music that we listen takes us to places where we would have never gone. There is too much of hatred in this world for supremacy in race, religion, language and cultures. But in all this nonsense and abhorrence, there is one thing that binds all of us without even a second thought… Love!

But how would you understand the concept of love for people whom you have never met or whom we have met and still unable to express ourselves? That’s where the byproduct of Love takes over… MUSIC

To shows us new doors to excitement and cultures, we don’t need to be a critic or someone who plays every instrument on this planet nor be a jack of all trades. All we need is to open ourselves to those small strings that make us nostalgic and take us down the memorable paths! Love shows us that life is not a monotonous journey but music with overlays and unending strings.

I am a music lover and a great fan of varied genres but you ask me to play an instrument, I just can’t. I don’t know what the keys are… I don’t know which instrument defines melody and which defines pathos but that never stopped me enjoying the nuances and clichés that music brings to me… If I am sad, I listen to The Beatles, Adele, Linkin Park and Eminem… If I am happy, I listen to MJ, Madonna, Rihanna, LMFAO, but then there is something more to the way you look at life…

My western sensibilities can be attributed to the way I was bought up in my youth or for the matter for my entire generation. Life is not about the choices we take; but it’s about how we make those choices work for us after we work for it seamlessly…

I was no different. I was bad in Hindi during my school days, my Telugu was bad during my college days and whenever I visited Chennai, my Tamil was just junk in the eyes of so many I know in Chennai… But did it stop my sensibilities or my love for the music across barriers? It actually never did…

There were great music directors from the North who gave some unforgettable and amazing numbers… Then I started to hear to the maestro – Illayaraaja who made sure that people still love South Indian Music… Music seemed to take a gentle approach and those 80’s and early 90’s were adorned with spells of music that was in general the feel of every Indian. Back then, my country was not open to the world. We were still struck in the socialist ideas of the erstwhile USSR. In general, we were happy with what we had…

Whenever my family, friends or cousins travelled to new worlds and were exposed to some amazing cultures, they would bring back those wonderful collections – songs and music which we hardly knew. We didn’t understand the lyrics, we didn’t know what was being conveyed in those songs, nor did we understand the music… Though the brilliant part was this… We still fell in love with it.

But then there were the traditional narcissists who hated the western flavor. And so began the generation cracks… Within few years, it turned into a generation gap.  In India, the educated rich, upper middle class masses were immersed in music of The Beatles, Elvis Presley, Elton John, Madonna, Queen, Pandit Ravi Shankar and so on… Then there was this middle and lower middle class people of my country who knew just MJ, Boney M and ABBA from the west, RD Burman, SD Burman, Vishwanathan-Ramamurthy, Laxmikanth Pyarelal, Jagjit Singh, Ghantashala, MS Subbalakshmi and many more… (There are many more legends but I just recognize this at the time of writing this article… Hence No Offence Meant (NOM))

India is a huge country with diverse religions, landscapes, numerous languages, cultures, races, festivals, states, districts and many more which are so different from one another that you just can’t connect everyone at one go… I guess the only exceptions were Mahatma Gandhi and Sachin Tendulkar! So when it comes to music, still there was this void in us…

We wanted someone who could appeal across all sections of the society…Someone who could penetrate into our living rooms, leave out our inhibitions, look straight to our friends and cousins settled in the west and around the world that we too have a guy who will not leave you for wanting more but will also make you think that here is a guy who could combine world music and create new genres that appeal not just the people who had tremendous musical sensibilities but also to the masses…The myth was finally shattered by a genius…

I was no more stuck to the usual songs of just Tamil in Tamil Nadu (South Indian state), Hindi (As it’s the national language and most in South India don’t accept it… Politics! You see…) with my friends, Telugu when in Hyderabad (Capital of the state Andhra Pradesh part of South-Central India).

I was listening to new sounds, new acoustics, new variations, theatrical grandeurs, new graphical representations, new horizons, new instruments, new sensibilities… In few years, the landscape of Indian music was changed…From movies that had led actors running around the trees making romance to revolution tones. Music was changing… It was moving in the right direction… We finally had a hero for us to stand up and understand our emotions and our need to be cool but at the same time Desi… We finally had a composer who would give you music that ranges from overlays of sad tones to dramatic emotions… I came to know what music can do to us. He made us cry…He made us dance…He created a veil of satisfaction…He showed us how even unconventional music can be butter to our breads…We finally had our musical storm…We finally had our Mozart of Madras…We had A R Rahman!

Here is what Wikipedia says about him… Some excerpts…

Allahrakka Rahman (born A. S. Dileep Kumar, 6 January 1967) is an Indian composer, singer-songwriter, music producer, musician, multi-instrumentalist and philanthropist. Described as the world’s most prominent and prolific film composer by Time, his works are notable for integrating Eastern classical music with electronic music sounds, world music genres and traditional orchestral arrangements.

He has won two Academy Awards, two Grammy Awards, a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe, four National Film Awards, fifteen Filmfare Awards and thirteen Filmfare Awards – South in addition to numerous other awards and nominations. His extensive body of work for film and the stage earned him the nickname “the Mozart of Madras” and several Tamil commentators and fans have coined him the nickname Isai Puyal (English: Musical Storm).

In 2009, Time placed Rahman in its list of World’s Most Influential People. The UK-based World Music magazine ‘Song lines’ named him one of ‘Tomorrow’s World Music Icons’ in August 2011.

More on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_R_Rahman

So in a way, Music is a journey and it chooses different people to elevate it to the next level which A R Rahman did it with sheer brilliance 🙂

Credits:

Featured Image – Naresh Ramadurai (http://dreamlenz.com/) ; Photo Subject: Kishore