#Scurf115: Listening to songs of the yore
To Kumar Sanu, Aashiqui and those kinda days
Until this morning I had not realised how much strength and nurturing I derived from the early nineties songs of Kumar Sanu. Be it those of Aashiqui, or Barsaat or even Saajan, the songs have a hold on me that is profound, singular and unrelenting in its grip.
The reason?
It might be something as direct as me simping for a simpler time, or something also more complicated, complex. That could be the fact that my mind draws an absolute clean slate each time I think of these songs. Their nostalgia comes as a solid respite, delivering me from many of their burdensome meanings (present and past).
The years when these songs released my mind was still freshly out of infancy. Grabbing hold of the world around. In my small north Indian town these songs were background noise to my daily existence, commute, even boredom. If it was a Saturday and I was traveling with my parents to their office for my fortnightly (horrible) haircut, I would invariably overhear one of these on poor but shrill and loud speakers of tempos chugging by. If I was waiting at the laiyya-chana stall, getting a mix made for Rs5, then a small, near dilapidated transistor would be silently oozing one of these songs out. As if in pain, and the song it’s own salve. If it was a weekday evening and I was just standing at my balcony and waiting for nothing, just life to arrive in the sleepy small town, our neighbour from across the road would play these at the highest volume on his home theatre. A jilted lover, his forlorn playlist then would make one-sided lovers of us all living in that street.
These songs, I now realise, played at the forefront of my memory as my brain, freshly childlike, was beginning to gather moss. Unable to fathom meanings of most words used in these ballads, I found myself perched on the fringes of these songs that were so widely and vastly accessible for almost everyone around me. This was before I started registering what hurt was, before I knew what sadness meant, way before I recognised what love and this kind of acute pining was framed of, after all. These songs then stretched themselves out of the landscape of my mind, bearing witness to a mind being formed.
Even before I knew what these songs pointed to, which feeling and which way they wanted to take us all, I was certain these songs were beyond my emotional and also, up to a large extent, social comprehension. They were meant for someone older than me, in a state different from mine, someone altogether other than me. The disconnect was so deep and profound that I almost started detesting their mere sound. The chasm between these songs and my perceived notion of them was so wide that even after growing up I couldn’t ever even get around to understanding what they meant.
What I did understand was that these were all about young adults or adults crying intensely about a loss that’s so hurtful they can’t stop weeping about it.
In lieu of this, I would sit in the loo, or the porch, or hang around in the terrace alone trying to scrap at the surface of a seemingly silly loss, trying to unearth a pain that would justify the agony depicted in these songs. What I would keep arriving at would inexorably be just the right kind of pathetic emptiness, a void so gaping, I would want to scream at it. There was the song, right before my senses, stretching itself wild and wide. And here I was, unable to reach at the exact or even near about feeling it was trying to put a finger to.
After trying for a few hours everyday, I would gingerly so, withdraw from even attempting further. Only to come back to them again. Why were these songs eluding me so adamantly?
In that I was working in the exact opposite direction of these songs. In a way those faux emotions I was trying to find within are the same I try to aim at when I see something unravel on social media in the present time. An emptiness that’s equally vacuous, profound and inane — each time, again and again — visits me each time I see a post about a trend, a calamity, a news event. I feel at distance. So long, away, removed.
The desolation I felt as a child, on the outside, trying to look in, also feels distinctly similar to the one I experience while on social media. Like both of them have elided, and are both for my own benefit, and yet are so readily dodging me. It is as though in trying to understand the various sadnesses online, I’m creating my own substantial, if only sad, but critical response to something. What that something is I don’t know. Saying that something made me sad is these days also saying that something moved you, caught your attention, if only for those few meagre seconds. But does it have any rooted, real implications?
A sadness that was once so particular to me, is now all pervasive, abundant, growing. I see people grapple with it, trying to find the near correct words to define it. A sadness of not fully understanding, reaching into the depth of the nights, keeping us outliers awake. Earlier it existed above and beyond the matrix of my personal life, now it hovers so around the edges of social media. This feeling is inscrutable in its pervasiveness, and yet continues to elude me.