‘Chandu Pottu’ was a commercially successful Malayalam movie in which Dileep did the role of an effeminate male. In one scene Dileep is walking with his companion women as one among them. Somebody asks, ‘where are you all going?’ and he replies with a shy feminine smile, “we are all going to the neighboring house to watch the TV serial and cry…”.That was then, when tear-jerker serial soaps were popular. But, today reality music shows are much more popular than fictional serials and pushing up the TRP ratings like never before. These shows are a regular feature of almost all language TV channels today.
A few singers are chosen from thousands of contestants and show-cased displaying their ‘singing’ skills. Celebrity judges and the TV audience who vote by SMS, select some singers from them. Many episodes of singing, dancing, fancy dressing and monkey tricks follow. Finally one chosen singer is presented as the ‘music super star’. Others are pronounced to have been eliminated!
These shows are nothing but an imitation of ‘American Idol’ first telecasted by the Fox TV Channel of USA in 2002. And today, licensed and unlicensed versions of American Idol reality show have spread to TV channels all over the world.
Where does ‘reality’ figure in this? These shows give lot of importance to the ‘realities’ behind the scenes. Acts of singers rehearsing, eating, sleeping and getting tensed and flustered are all part of this ‘reality’. And on stage, the audience gets to see how the anchor girls of the shows embracing the contestants with encouraging words just before the judges embarrass them with questions, dent their confidence with criticism and reduce them to tears.
Television viewers watching these shows see singers eliminated by SMS votes, crying their heart out in front of the cameras along with their tearful families and friends. Those tears are real and that is what the ‘reality’ mongers want! No soap can bring out such natural emotions. Now the audience can get ready to cry to their heart’s content and get truly emotional watching real tear drops. They now prefer these reality shows instead of the stale and fictional ‘mother in-law, daughter in-law’ and ‘the other woman’ soaps.
Recently an American website had conducted a poll to list world’s 100 best singers ever. I saw Yesudas being proposed as one among those top singers thanks to the global Malayalees! He is at 36th in the list. John Lennon came 49th, Barbara Streisand was 52nd and Frank Sinatra managed to be 56th! Luciano Pavarotti, ranked by connoisseurs of music as one of the world’s best opera singers, was ranked by this poll as 99th. Many of the winners from the recent reality music shows figured in the top as world’s best singers!
In the age of the softwares that could send millions of SMSs by a click, just about anyone can become world’s top singer with the help of some organised SMSing. It is no wonder that the ‘reality’ music shows have enabled countless TV viewers, without any sensitivity for music to casually elect top singers of the world as a part of their daily routine!
Do you have a passable look? Can you ‘dance’ on the stage uninhibitedly? Can you just about manage to sing a few popular numbers that have managed to reach the lowest common denominator of the TV audience? Excellent! Get ready to be elected as the world’s top singer by mobile phones!
In reality, all the emotional scenes shot in such ‘reality’ episodes are elaborately planned. Singers getting tensed up, ‘hot’ discussions and verbal duals among the judges, the tearful participants and studio audience – all are well planned and micro-managed. Singers are merely unwitting victims of such scheming.
A good singer in ordinary clothes hailing from a rural area can easily get eliminated on grounds of lack of ‘attitude’ or ‘appeal’ or ‘performance’. Judges have many scales of measurement like appearance, showmanship, hair style, dress, the accent of English etc. An average singer with the right dress, make-up and capable of right kind of gyrations on stage can easily ‘eliminate’ a good singer who is without these ‘extra’ abilities. Above all, what is the guarantee that a good singer can dance as well? If an S.P. Balasubramaniam were to compete on such a stage, the point that will most probably attract judges will be his generous tummy and not his singing abilities!
‘Indian Idol’ is a reality show totally copying the ‘American Idol’. Hindi film music composer and a failed Indi pop Singer Anu Mallick is an important Judge in this show. I know him well enough. I had worked with the unfortunate music record company that released this Indi pop album named ‘Lafda’ (means trouble!) sung by Anu Mallick and lost crores of rupees. As a composer his only ‘greatness’ is plagiarizing maximum number of songs! Such infamous judges without the requisite music sensitivity are paid a fortune to egg on ‘dramas’ and ‘tear jerkers’ on these shows. On the other hand factors like race, religion, caste and region control the judgment of the SMS voters.
For example one needs to look no further than Prasant Tamang, a young policeman of Nepali origin from Darjeeling, who was elected the last ‘Indian Idol’. Though with a reasonably good voice, he had neither the ability to express emotions through singing nor the sense to keep to the pitch of the song well. How did he secure the votes to become an ‘Indian Idol’? As it became apparent from the subsequent turn of events, an emotive enough issue to motivate people with similar racial features as Tamang to mass SMS and organise the win of their ‘Idol’. When an opinion that Prasant Tamang was not a good enough singer was aired over a private radio channel in Delhi, all hell broke out in Darjeeling, creating a major law and order problem for many days!
What do such singers achieve post-reality-show-victories? Where is Nikhil after his victory in Vijay TV’s Super Singer contest? Where has Abhijit Sawant, India’s first ‘Idol’ gone? Season II ‘Idol’, Sandeep Acharya brought out a Music album that was a huge flop. He could not even sing to the basic pitch of the songs in the album. TV channels know the worth of these ‘Idols’ and most of the time they wash their hands off on them after the grand finale!
Are the shows put on by these reality music programmes the reality of Indian Music? Singers in India are not known for their flamboyance. They do not come with long hairs dyed in a variety of colours or with black goggles and garish garments. Most of our singers do not bother about their dresses beyond a simple customary dress. Putting up an ‘appearance’ is a non-issue for our singers. Often, they are introverts who concentrate only on their music. Even in the publicity-conscious western nations, singers and performers get a ‘make-over’ only after they become a big label or a singing institution requiring a ‘make-up’ befitting the platform they themselves created through years of hard work and disciplined toil. Even famous singer performers like Johnny Cash had to roam the streets in search of an audience before he made it.
These reality shows are not a search for the real singing talent. These are theatres of the absurd that chose singers for their talents other than singing! Such events actually dishearten and defeat the real singing talent. Only phony singers emerge from such farce, where a mass of people with little or indifferent sensitivity to music sit in judgment on music talent. People like me who have spent a good slice of our life in the field of music will only be enraged and saddened by such reality shows.
Come to think of it, what indeed is the reality of music? A Persian proverb says that ‘sweetness of music is its sadness’. Inalienable sadness innate in good music is its most appealing feature. Many of the humanizing aspects of the animal called man like helplessness, unavoidable loneliness, endless and often pointless wait, yearnings we are unable to express and many similar indefinable yet poignant emotions of life express themselves in good music in its many flavours. Human culture and traditions accord music an immortal place in its very being as it expresses the formless sadness of man in an enjoyable form of sound.
Life has never been particularly sweet for me. Nothing consoled me except music in my sad childhood days. With nothing else to look forward for, I clenched to it with all my faculties. It was my only medium of bearing the burden of daily aches and taking me to the future of my dreams. This role of music in my life continues to this day.
Even today, as I sit down to write this, my mind is deeply stressed. My two years old daughter, unmindful of my consoling words, is crying out in excruciating pain. Her two legs are plaster cast, forcing them in two different angles. The pain is too much for my child, yet she has to bear the cross. And there is nothing I could do about it. So, here I am, sitting in the midst of her plaintive wails, heavy of heart but writing about music.
I married Jessy in 1997 and we have been issueless for eight long years. Different medical specialists examined in many different ways and pronounced the inability to conceive as inexplicable. But they did not give up on examining and subjecting us to medicines and therapies. As a strong believer in modern science and medicine, I followed all their prescriptions and did whatever we could. But the results were zilch. The hormone treatments only presented a fresh set of medical problems and mental strains. My wife and I had enough of it and decided to end the therapies.
We decided to adopt an infant girl. Our decision was not greeted with joy by our relatives. I had always been firm about my decisions and I went ahead with the formalities of adopting a baby. I learnt from these efforts for adoption, what a made-for-grief set of laws our nation has. It is very easy to give birth to a child in India than adopting one, provided the couple does not have the kind of problems we had. Adopting a baby legally is one long and difficult journey through the maze of laws and legalities which is not for the faint hearted. In the first place, it is assumed that you have all the money in the world! At last after two years of heart-breaking efforts, on December third of the year 2005, we adopted our baby – a barely 3 months old pure bundle of joy. We named her Geeti Salila.
When she came to us from the adoption centre, she was an under-nourished and extremely under-weight baby. Her face had a heart-breaking expression of being ever ready to weep, yet she wouldn’t cry. She was too frightened to even cry. When I took her in my arms, she sensed my affection and held on to me tightly. Suddenly a sense of pride had sprouted in her little mind, I thought.
Within the month, she became one of us. She even started smiling, with a twinkle in her angelic eyes. Slowly she became our life, reordering it totally to revolve around her. Legal tangles of adoption took some more time to sort and solve. But she was in our arms and nothing else mattered.
She was six months old when we discovered that she had difficulty in using her left arm. She kept her fingers a tightly closed fist, as if she was holding something in it. It was only when we showed her to a specialist who discovered that she held her left leg also in a similar fashion. The specialist recommended an immediate brain scan. Geeti had come to us with a medical certificate from doctors who attended to her from birth that she was ‘perfectly normal’. Moreover, I was too frightened to subject the tender body of our child to an MRI scan. So we decided to wait.
When Geeti was a year-old baby, on the advice of an infant neurologist, I took her for MRI scan. Those days were some of the most harrowing moments of my life. I shiver in fright even today when I hark back to the memory. Geeti was sedated, but she refused to be quiet. She was then administered more sedation. I couldn’t stand watching her in that bare white and impersonal scan room. The equipment there had a cruel metallic light. They raised weird sounds of screaming, sometimes like factory machines, sometimes like an air plane negotiating a steep landing and sometimes like the breaking of huge glass walls. They were accompanied by piercing whistle sounds.
Their sounds, in different wave lengths, felt like riddling my body with bullets. It felt like a nightmarish scene where I had handed over my child to a heartless metal monster to make a meal of her, I could sense her being swallowed by the beast and horror of its roar of devilish delight. The Scanning machine used all these weird sounds to construct a picture of her brain function. It required her to keep her head still. Amidst all these Geeti kept quiet and still for about 25 minutes!
We were given the result of the MRI scan as printouts, film and CD put in a cover. We were too frightened to open the cover. My legs were shaking in fright. We went to see the doctor totally oblivious to the world around us. On the way, my wife dared to open the envelope and seeing the remark ‘normal’ against most of the lines; she brightened enough to comfort herself. But my mind refused to be comforted. The specialist on infants’ brain went through the report carefully for a long time and finally pronounced that my child had a rare brain deficiency. “All that can be said now is that it may create various levels of developmental delays for her. Time alone can determine the final result.” Hearing this, my wife collapsed in her seat. I was struggling to breathe. The next few days, the whole world appeared to us in a haze through a screen of tears. But around us, our daughter was playing and prattling on happily.
Geeti is today 26 months old. She, with her exceptionally expressive eyes and a bright and out-of-this-world smile, has her own way of welcoming and accepting things she likes with a noticeable delight. Good music is one of the things in her list of preferences. She has this capacity to understand things quickly. She is a very emotional and a very, very loving child. Even now, Geeti cannot stand up or walk. She is still an infant in arms. I have not ceased to be surprised and charmed by every little thing about her. I see in her, how the mind irrespective of the state of the body, looks forward to life eagerly and how love blossoms the mind. Today she is the epicenter of my life, every thing that I am.
Last month she had to undergo an important injection-cum-physiotherapy session to lessen the tightness and rigidity in her legs. Doctors say that this will help her to stand up and walk in about six months’ time. The plaster cast on her legs to keep the artificially corrected posture in place is a part of this therapy. This should continue for 3 weeks. We are sitting with her, counting every moment of these 21 days to pass.
Geeti means song. Salila is the name I have given her in memory of the late Composer, Salil Chowdhury. For me, Geeti is nothing but the dearly loved music. Music appears to me as a great vista of space and I travel through this space daily with grief as my spaceship. Music transforms all my sadness into a sweet emotion. Intense pain or a deep sense of loss, music creates a state of mind to me that savours both.
On this earth man goes beyond the nature given pleasures and sorrows, to create a wonderful dreamscape of his own. Music may be one among his greatest pleasures which helps him to lay down this dreamy space. This is a space where man converts his sorrows into a pleasurable experience turning nature’s scheme upside down to suit his mindset and taste. And there, the sadness and loneliness that nature has made unavoidable for man are the stuff of great music. It is this nature of music that bestows on man a sense of being whole, overcoming his sorrows. And nothing can defeat him in the wonderful dreamscape of music. According to me this is the ‘reality’ of music.
A tired Geeti Salila has drifted off into sleep. I switch on a Malayalam channel where another reality music show is on. A young girl contestant stands defeated and head bowed in humiliation. The judge, well known to me, is trying his utmost to cause further injuries to her senses and make her tears into an inconsolable cry. These tears of the defeated candidates are the triumphs of such ‘judges’ of music and such ‘unreal’ shows. All I could do is to laugh at the irony of it all.
November 2007
Listen to Judy Garland's
Listen to Roy Orbison's
Listen to Elvis Presley's
