No doubting this: the Child is the father of Man (Wordsworth). Our childhood has the potential to determine how our adulthood pans out, which makes childhood habits important.
One accidental habit I’ve retained since childhood is listening to music before beginning the day’s work. Among other benefits this ‘fix’ has unequivocally helped me grapple with and prevail over debilitating depression and OCD since I was 21. But a longing to learn music began only after I heard Jean Luc Ponty as a 16-year-old.
I come from a family of philistines; nobody in my family ever thought of investing in any art. Music was restricted to film songs on the radio. But then: even someone such as Big B bemoans his ignorance of music despite owning a grand piano for years!
Outside home, my teacher-father had made it a tradition of sorts to disappoint the school on Children’s Day. Each year he nonchalantly picked Kannada songs from the 1950s that could be understood by no more than about 5 per cent of the students and about 8 per cent of his colleagues, devotedly practised them at home for about a fortnight before crooning at the function, but otherwise never sang or listened to music. (Later, as a college teacher, I found this to be true of many of my male colleagues whose music affinity is limited to ringtones and FM. Hardly ever musical before family, they eagerly turn mike-happy to oblige girl students with ‘film hits’ during college “cultural” festivals. Rarely, if at all, were women heard singing on such occasions.)
As the years passed, Ponty’s vibes, like the Ghost of Hamlet, kept fracking my soul as though to remind me of the dangers of repressing my deepest longings. I began to obsess about my musical clock ticking away. I was now 39, and restlessly sought a change in my career since the college where I taught had degenerated into chronic corruption. A casual vacancy check of a hill-station ‘international’ school website changed my musical fortune. A few months later I found myself outside the school’s music department waiting to introduce myself to one who was known to be a generous music teacher: Derek Prince.
Derek Prince cheerfully scheduled my classes to begin that winter. Often, as I entered music department, I could see a small group of my students crouched near the practice room sniggering and waiting for me to ‘squeak’. My colleagues dismissed me as someone who wasn’t “serious” about life. How can a middle-ager learning music instead of marrying and getting busy with children be serious about life, eh?
But why should learning magic or music or mimicry at middle-age make one less serious about life? Blame it on the Indian psyche that “compartmentalises” life but every day I watch middle-aged men and women killing precious time with worthless gossip mostly about things simply beyond their control. And they say I’m not serious about life! Would anyone serious about life kill time the way they’re doing? Or are they misled into thinking wasting life is less important than wasting time? Should we prepare for the last sunset on a high note or a low note or an utterly discordant, jarring note that can ruin an otherwise entirely satisfactory performance? I’m glad my days are now “noted”, not numbered. And unlike the idlers I’m not going to wake up one day to the blunder of being good at nothing, particularly some form of art.
I know I’m not practising to become a musician; I’m quite content to just let music complete my education. Then my freedom would have matured. And when our freedom has matured we will find people, particularly women, becoming musical at home singing what they like and not restricted to worship.
Isn’t it true that a nation’s advancement and progress involves sufficient investment in not only its economic capital but cultural capital as well? But does investment in cultural capital figure in any government models? If the Child is the father of Man, Culture is the cradle of Civilisation. Meanwhile, my friends and neighbours are growing uneasy with my increasing musical clout.
mjx143@gmail.com
