High Fidelity

My first post has to be about music as I must confess that before I fell in love with literature, I fell hard and fast for the process of making music. Obsessed, I spent hours between bands as they jammed, waiting for them to transition, from non-descript underdogs to musical geniuses. 9 out of 10 times, it never happened. Here I attempt to understand what makes most underground musicians in Delhi fail in the long run. Is it the drug fuelled idealism, artistic exploration or a little bit of both?

My first post has to be about music as I must confess that before I fell in love with literature, I fell hard and fast for the process of making music. Obsessed, I spent hours between bands as they jammed, waiting for them to transition, from non-descript underdogs to musical geniuses. 9 out of 10 times, it never happened. Here I attempt to understand what makes most underground musicians in Delhi fail in the long run. Is it the drug fuelled idealism, artistic exploration or a little bit of both?

They are mad. Careless and irreverent about possibilities of what they could be. Their dreams a smoky haze lost in the strums of their guitars. Shadows of their futile exercises lie discarded as evidence on the walls of life. Songs on spot, trance on the microphone, the happiness of it all a little too contagious, a psychedelic void threatening to suck you in. Like a meteor chasing the earth, it will all realise one day in, perhaps a crash that could eliminate the stars or make way for the black hole.

But right now, it was the start and in some sort of twisted play of fate it all seemed like the beginning of the end. There was decay in the room, its smell, sweet and sticky, hard to decipher, but its presence pervaded into my being as I sat and observed the paradox unfold before my eyes. They were young, arrogant, selfish opportunists whose pseudo-all cultural consuming stance would begin to change the way they looked at the world and cause ridges where once bridges had been. It would take time for them to realise that they were all left hanging mid air, suspended between the burning bridges of ego clashes and a struggle for power.

As I prophesies about their life, I feel a hand on my head; it’s one of them, curious about my rambling. I ignore and hit mute in my head. Day after day, they go through the process of concluding their daily chores of musical notes while their minds wander and spirits fragment the subconscious. Tucking gently into precocious memories, that are neither strong nor as passionate as they will them to be. Very soon they will be bit by reality; it will crawl unto them like a shadow and surprise them with its gravity. Charade will then become the preferred game, naïve enough to think that they could pull it off, they will make it grotesque and plastic, eventually blowing it up in the sweet leaf. Its fragrance stinging nostrils, pungent and fresh long after its death. Change would come sweeping in, not like a lauded hero, but like a loving mistress, gliding gently through the night. Forming new attachments, extensions and desperate attempts at reconciliations. Underplayed, silent movie style—unhinged forever, no longer jaded, just oblivious to their many afflictions. An anti-thesis that defined the naïveté of an entire generation of the hungry and the foolish who thought they could pave way for magic to come.

About The Author

Gunjeet Sra