THE UNKNOWN PANDIT AND LOUIS BANKS

Staying in a suburb has its own advantages. Especially if you have a creek at the rear side of the apartment and an Express Highway bordering the creek. Poets say that the creek is “The huge eye of the earth”. The Highway must be the eye-liner. Chemical factories with their smoke emitting chimneys formed an array further ahead. The bustle of the city was absent and one could watch the unhurried colony life as a fringe benefit.

Life in the colony was calibrated at regular intervals by religious festivals.

            Ganeshotsav for example. Cultural programmes were organized in the evenings which ran late into the night. A man in his mid thirties who stayed in the colony gave a vocal recital. It was the first time I was listening to a live Hindustani concert. The audience had settled themselves on the tarpaulin spread on the ground. There was an unassuming stage near to the illuminated and heavily garlanded idol. The humility of the artist certainly stroked a chord in me. Dressed in spotlessly white kurtha-pyjamas, he remained an austere one-man island unaffected by the surrounding tribulations. 

Why wasn’t the gentleman protesting through his music? I asked to myself. He was not begging for alms. He never seemed to be searching for his redeemer either. His music was immersed in a particular bhava - a feeling of loss, perhaps. It created a mood of nostalgia for the past years. Or it might be an expression of ambitions given up. Anyway, he was fulfilling himself through his music and that made him a contended man.

            The audience grew in number as the concert progressed. People residing in faraway slums too turned up. Two of them stood at the periphery of the venue wearing only loose underwear, i.e., lined half-pants and baniyans, were hesitant to move forward. Were they untouchables? I didn’t know. The organizers invited them to come to front and sit on the tarpaulin. They did.

I couldn’t figure out the raga. I was unable to keep the timings too. The audience consisting of mostly government servants made gestures with their fingers at most inappropriate times. The vocalist didn’t seem to bother. Afterall, he was an insider. The unknown babu turned Pandit.  Tucked under the mundane existence of the ten-to –five grind, the music must have helped him in surviving the sad and savage life around.

I enjoyed the concert.

Shortly afterwards, I went for a rock concert, as a first timer. One of my friends named Jairam accompanied. He always used to keep goli in his trouser pockets to save the procuring time in an emergency. We went for the rock-show Aid Bhopal Concert. The proceeds were to be given away to the victims of Bhopal Gas Leak tragedy. Sitting at the dark corner of Azad maidan, Jairam melted the goli with the help of a lighted matchstick and mixed the substance with tobacco. Inside the stadium the sea of youngsters, mostly college students were raring to go. They had been set on fire by a middle-aged, portly man wearing a goatee (read french-beard) and large sunglasses. 

He was on stage playing his own composition, Shanti, on the keyboards. It was a fine number with its roots in classical music. A variant of Bhairavi, perhaps. Anybody would have been comforted and put to ease. But a group of youngsters gyrated to the music swaying large placards which said “WE LOVE BHOPAL”. The world’s worst industrial disaster had occurred in Bhopal just a month back killing 4,000 odd people and blinding double that number. An uncontrollable laughter erupted in us. Jairam and I started laughing. Eyes closed, clapping our hands, bent down … we laughed. Rising up, we again laughed. When we were about to contain it, our eyes met and laughter erupted again. We could not stop laughing in spite of our best efforts.

Sincerity is the only thing that matters, I mused after a while. I had seen the documentary “Woodstock – Three Days of Music, Peace and Love”.





Three hundred thousand young men and women mostly in their early twenties gathered at the wheat-fields of Woodstock, a place bordering the forests in White Lake,  New York for three consecutive days in 1969 and protested against Vietnam War. The comforts were almost nil, not even the basic amenities but nobody complained. Musicians from all over, especially the black, performed without a break. The rains came and nobody ran helter-skelter. Water melons from the far end of the crowd were passed from hand to hand to the artist performing on the stage. He stopped for a while as a thanksgiving gesture to collect the reward.

This sort of enthusiasm and bonhomie which stem from a deep concern for others do not have a place for exhibitionism. The young crowd didn’t want to impress upon anybody. They were quite spontaneous. Oddly enough, they invited the wrath of the US government.  Unfortunately the fire couldn’t be sustained and people had ceased to care. Why? We shall explore the reasons in a separate post.