chakravyuha

The dreary and monotonous Jagjit Singh had this to say about A. R. Rahman and his compositions. It’s really sad that an accomplished singer such as Jagjit Singh made this comment. That’s a sign of someone who’s essentially cemented himself in his own musical concrete. Any contemporary phenomenon requires you to get out of your comfort zone and try to see beyond your own blinkered world-view. Jagjit’s Singh’s rigid immobility has perhaps rendered this option impossible for him. So he has decided to take the easy way out and declare “They don’t know what ghazals are all about and they lack good taste in music. What does AR Rahman know about ghazals? He will never use a ghazal in his films. All they do is pick up tunes from the West“.

Rahman does not “lack good taste”. Excuse me, but the man that created modern Indian contemporary soundtrack masterpieces such as “Yuva“, “Rang De Basanti” and “Swades” does not lack nor not lack taste, he defines taste. Musicians like Rahman and Vishal Dadlani are at the vanguard of new music. They create taste. They are defining new Indian music and establishing a new era. So what if he does not use ghazals in his films. Since when did ghazals become the only cultural touchstones? To his comment about picking about tunes from the west, what on earth is that supposed to even mean? Rahman is one of the most original artists on the landscape. He surely cannot be accused of lifting tunes. So maybe Jagjit Singh is talking about Rahman incorporating a lot of instruments of non-Indian origin in his compositions. Is that somehow supposed to lessen his creations?

Music is not just poetic lyrics. Music is not just classical form. Music is not ghazals. Music is not table or guitar. Music is Music. It encompasses all of these and much much more. Good music is not just poetic or beautiful lyrics, it’s also creative, original, virtuoso instrumentation. Instrumental arrangement that soar, uplift, touch your heart and transport you to soci heaven. Jagjit Singh has been singing in the same tone with the same inflections since forever. To me all his ghazals sound musically inert. He might as well just sit down and recite them without any instrument because it surely is perfunctory that form. There might be creativity, poetry and beauty in the written word of ghazals, but there’s surely nothing creative in his music. Rahman’s creations are not just pure fun, they are genius. If Jagjit Singh were not too set in his way he would recognize how good it really is. In my books, Rahman is even a better singer than Jagit Singh.

About those lyrics too, for which he says – “Today, there’s no poetry phrasing, it’s all Western and the language is tapori — a mix of English and Hindi. What kind of lyrics are Pappu can’t dance saala?“. To that I say – “So?”. What’s exactly wrong with non-poetic? What’s wrong with mixing a little English in Hindi? For that matter what’s poetic? Do we not use English heavily in our day-to-day lives? Even non-rhyming verses without a defined meter or other classical elements of poetry might serve well in the context of a song that’s designed to evoke some emotion. When Anupama, Benny Dayal, Blaze, Tanvi, Darshana, Satish Subramanium & Aslam sing “Pappu can’t dance saala” it registers in your system in a way that can only perhaps register with someone who was not born when dinosaurs like Lata Mangeshkar, Kumar Sanu, Udit Narayan, Anu Malik, the duo Laxmikant-Pyarelal etc. roamed this earth and throttled any and all talent that might dare to peek out of that collective colossal edifice that was the music scene of that era. It’s an upbeat emotional call-to-arms to go to the dance floor, to lose yourself in the beat and the rhythm, lyrical poetry be damned. Incidentally, there’s other merit in that song, but I’ll get to that in a later post. All of this is not to bash any of these performers. I acknowledge their obvious talent. What frustrates is how these people got embedded into the whole nation and literally sucked the life out of contemporary music. The 60′s to late 90′s might have been the golden age of the lyric but it’s was the absolute pits for music as a whole.

Culture is not static and if it is, it should not be. A culture that’s rigid and does not learn to bend and twist and even sprout new branches, will just snap one day under the winds of change and cease to exists. Jagit Singh’s comment actually point to a larger malasie in the Indian society. We are just to dammned calcified with notion of supposed superiority of our culture and our ways. If you dig a little deeper we are actually stagnating as a society and as a nation. We are stifling creativity and entrepreneurship and most importantly, change. But I’ll address this point in another post.

Listening to A. R. Rahamn’s Delhi-6 (more here and trailer here) and from whatever I have heard so far, it’s awesome. This is Rahman’s first soundtrack after his accolade-gathering effort Slumdog Millionaire. A detailed analysis to follow….

Zubin Jelveh on Portfolio has an interesting piece on why such a small percentage (~47%) of married women are in the workforce in New York City. One word reason – traffic. Minneapolis is at the other end of the specturm with 87% of married women in the working population.

Sam Gustin has an illuminating piece at Portfolio on the role of quantative analysts in the current financial collapose.

… and the layoffs continue.

Saw Aziz Ansari at the Punchline Comedy Club in SFO on Saturday. His act was very good and I would readily recommend it to anyone who would like a fun weekend evening. Beware though, his humor is blunt and vulgar at times but that’s de rigueur for most standup acts. He is an American by birth and Indian by ethnicity.  What I found refreshing though, was that his material did not revolve around the ethno-centric wellspring of humor that guys like Russell Peters and others exploit all the time. In fact, there were none of those jokes to be found., barring one about the built of people from India (and how they are supposed to be skinny and all that). Aziz is working on a Judd Apatow file called Funny People and he did a segment, in-character, as a character called Randy that he’s developing for that project. Other hillarious bits included his imitation of that old staple, the redneck southerner. It stood out for me because there was a certain freshness to how he setup and constructed that whole piece. His style is very animated and he moves around the stage a lot using his whole body as a tool to deliver the jokes. Good Stuff.

Techcrunch has a neat little layoff tracker. Things are getting scarier and scarier.