Concerts, Music, Myself

Skeletons in my closet

I want to tell you a secret.

Once upon a time, I used to play the keyboard and sing. Not too badly, and not too well either, in both cases – I was what one could call a passable singer and a rather “experimental” keyboardist. Never took formal lessons on the keys, I was a play-it-by-ear kind of a guy. I did go to violin school for six years, though, and graduated upto fourth year in the Bhatkhande School of Hindustani Classical Music. Took a breather from the violin because of studies ( alas, the plight of the studious Indian male) and I never went back to continuing it. But I was deep into Rahman, at that time, and managed to coerce my father into buying a small Yamaha keyboard. It was a PSR 299, just the thing for a beginner – dinky keys and tinny-sounding rhythm banks which sounded extremely cool to me at that time. Practised on my own, tried to play anything and everything I listened to ( not kidding, there). But was never really serious about it. One cannot afford to, because the words “Joint Entrance Examinations” somehow permeate every adolescent’s waking and dreaming moments. So I did it just for kicks, and it was a kind of guilty pleasure. Which is always good.

Then I joined college, and a strange thing happened. The Music Club there was auditioning for a new keyboardist; the former keyboardist had been part of the graduating batch the year I joined. Well, they weren’t really auditioning, just checking out potential musicians, and by some strange coincidence, one of my batchmates landed up in my room with a PSR 299 in his hands, looking for a plugpoint where he could put the adapter in; the keyboard was all the Music Club could manage with its meagre funds, as I found out later. Pretty soon the room was filled with seniors (which was against the rules then, because of the anti-ragging law. Seniors were prohibited from entering the first year hostels. Not that RECians were too well-known for sticking by rules). I kind of nervously edged forward and tried my hands at it when everyone else was done, and er, I played the first thing that came into my mind – which happened to be the opening piano tune from ‘Pehla Nasha’. I suppose what seemed more important that day to the seniors was the familiarity with which I handled the PSR 299 – I knew, for instance, that the sound of the Koto produced a better piano sound that the actual piano (yes, I see the Japanese connection, thank you. It was entirely unintentional) – and I knew…well, let me just say that I was totally at ease with that keyboard. And this was really the first time I was playing in front of someone who was not a member of my family.

So yeah, I got invited to the music club that night, and was asked to play various songs and stuff, which I did. To say that my confidence in myself increased quite a bit would be an understatement. I was getting rather excited about the fact that, wow, people thought I was good. And it would have stayed at that, really, except for my batchmate. You see, when the senior club members were talking among themselves about singers in the first year, he broke into their conversation, pointed at me, and said “This guy sings too.” And why did he say so? Because I was the guy who would sing ‘Chaiyya Chaiyya’ (1998, the year I joined college was also the Year of Dil Se) at the drop of a hat. I loved the song so much I knew the words, and could even hum the string sections, and play the percussion on a table when I sang. So I was made to sing ‘Chaiyya Chaiyya’, and a little bit of this song, and that song. The seniors finally got thoroughly confused – half of them wanted to keep me as a keyboardist, and the other half wanted me to sing. I ended up doing both. But that day, my first day at the Music Club, was a day I will never forget in my life.

I played in my (note the use of the word “my”. Yes, that was all mine ) first concert in front of the college, a couple of weeks later. It was meant to be a Freshers’ Welcoming Party, and there I was, a Fresher playing among seniors (extremely cool musicians, too. Well, most of them). The first song was an instrumental rendition of, you guessed it, “Pehla Nasha”, partly because the seniors felt that, since I knew the song, I wouldn’t flub it. And I didn’t. I think. My hands did shake in the first couple of notes, until the drums crashed in, and my batch-mates gave me a cheer. By the time the concert ended, I had played for a Mohd Rafi number (‘Aaja Aaja’), the Beatles’ ‘Hey Jude’, this funky Indipop song by Jojo called ‘Woh Kaun Thi’ ( which the lead singer totally killed with his tune-lessness); I don’t remember the names of the others – I think I have them written down somewhere – and I was completely, completely in love with the Music Club. I was to play for three more concerts that year, and also made my onstage singing debut – had sung as part of choruses in school, but that didn’t count, bwahaha – I sang this song from Bada Din, called ‘Suno Zaraa’.

I did quite well in my academics in the First Year, and my parents, who were well-aware of my rather “serious” interest in music, albeit a little wary of how it would affect my studies, were gratified by the results. My father ended up getting me a Yamaha PSR 520, a humongous keyboard that became my proudest possession the moment I laid eyes on it in the store. It cost my parents quite a bit of dough, but I guess they were taken in by my enthusiasm. Too bad. I never did too well in college after that, just sort of lost interest in academics. While the motivation once upon a time had been to score high, post-second year, it became a cursory attempt to avoid a “suppli” – a euphemism for a failing grade. It might seem strange to you, but I remember my years in college as a series of songs, one after the other. The best thing to look forward to, in a given semester, was the number of concerts we would produce, the number of songs we would present, selecting songs that would get a good response from the audience. It was insane, frankly speaking. In the second year, I found out that a senior who I had only known as a Rahman fan was also a very good classically-trained singer. A guy from Bangladesh, who I thought was a weirdo in the first year, proved to be a guitarist who lived up to the reputation that left-handed guitarists had. Oh, we jammed. We would go into deserted hostel rooms for better echo, and record our voices and instruments onto my walkman (it was still the Cassette Age, back then, and I had just bought a walkman with…hold your breath….stereo recording capability!) We would transcribe songs together, breaking them up into pieces that could be played on the small number of instruments the Club had. One of the headiest moments in my life was playing “Yeh Haseen Vadiyan” onstage with my keyboard, a set of nearly out-of-tune acoustic drums, and an acoustic guitar. Yes, my friend from Bangladesh painstakingly played power-chords on an acoustic guitar to get that thick bass effect that defines the song. We improvised, we took licenses with songs because we did not have any other choice. We would also think of ways to refuse people who wanted stage time – yes, there were folks who wanted to get up on stage and sing a song just because they had a bet with their friends, or they wanted to show off before their girlfriends. There were times we could say a flat “no”, other times, we were forced to go along with whatever the Club senior said – and we promised ourselves that when we were seniors ourselves, we wouldn’t let people boss us around this way.

The Music Club was a very fluctuating mixture of people, folks who came if they did not have exams nearby, or a particularly difficult professor’s class. If you wanted to be in it, you had to compromise on your class-room attendance, and that was a turn-off for a good number of folks. The Club was a room with excellent acoustics, placed rather strategically on the campus, right next to the auditorium, on the other side of the normal route one would take to the hostels. There was a velvet carpet on the floor, and an interior room that had a thick layer of dust and an air of mystery about it – broken instruments lay strewn around, discarded bongoes, a broken harmonium, maracas with nothing inside them, out-of-tune tablas, an earthen pot (which one could use as a ghattam, and we did, for ‘Taal Se Taal Mila’, in my second year), even an electric guitar with a completely smashed body – with discordant histories about how it came to be broken. The Club was a place with a checkered, rich and rather complicated backstory; as the years went by, I heard tales about the place from seniors, from other professors who would drop in to listen to us practice, from our own Club Administrator, a very likeable gent from the Civil Engineering Department, and of course, from whispered rumors from batch-mates, who had heard stories from their seniors. Just thinking about that room gives me goose-pimples right now, it had this rather peculiar smell, partly from the damp carpet, partly from the unwashed students that crowded inside the place. The drummer’s corner lay to the left of the door, and the singers and hangers-on occupied the right corner. The rest of the musicians took up various strategic positions around the room, the guitarists would walk around and I would stand at a place where I could listen to all the instruments and play mine at the same time without getting overwhelmed by the sound – right next to the Ahuja monitor speakers.

When I was in the Third Year, something happened. Something rather personal and nasty, something which killed all motivation in me to “do” any music. I listened to music like mad, and transcribed songs like crazy, but Third Year was a Year of Rest, a year of no concerts in the college. Most people knew what was wrong in my life, and they didn’t insist. And because I was the only keyboardist around, things kind of came to a standstill in the Club that time.

Final Year, things changed. For starters, I found that a batch-mate from Assam, a guy who had just begun to learn the guitar in the First Year, could now play like a God. One fateful day in the classroom, a couple of us talked, including a guy I hadn’t talked to for three years. (Yes, I am quite childish that way, or I was, once upon a time.) We need to do something no one’s ever done in this college, we decided. A rock concert. So we did one, and we called it Wrecstasy ( Don’t ask. Pun on college name, one of those bright ideas that sound really cool when you think about it the first time, and later, you are doomed to disgrace when you try to explain it. Kind of like the word “beatzo”.) Because we didn’t have any electric guitars, we made it an unplugged thing. Then we did a couple more concerts. The last semester of my Final Year, we did five concerts. It was crazy. My friend picked up power drumming in two weeks, by listening and playing along to Deep Purple and Buckcherry tapes, and went wild on stage.

And then I graduated, and began working. My friends went their ways, one guy to Nepal, one to Bangladesh, another to Surat. One joined the same company as me. I had resisted all offers made by my juniors and professors to buy my keyboard off me – I just could not think of giving up the only relic I had of four years of exciting times. Occasionally I would pull my keyboard out and give it a couple of half-hearted tinkles, and then safely zip it back again into the carrybag. It just wasn’t the same to sit and play all by myself. Then I bought a MIDI cable, and hooked up the keyboard to my computer, and figured out how to work with Cakewalk. Hallelujah! I could feel that old motivation returning, so I bought a keyboard stand, one of those height-adjustible-type thingies, and hooked up the setup. One fine day, I decided to begin my MIDI experiments. Switched on the computer, switched on the keyboard power supply, and then the darn thing just refused to switch on. Some crucial chip had blown, it seemed. Nobody in Hyderabad could repair it, because the chip was just not available anywhere. Music shops gave me numbers of technicians who were missing, out of station, or just didn’t pick up their phones, adding to my frustration. Others said they could get it fixed, but quoted service charges that scared the bejeezus out of me.

It was on one of these days following my equipment’s demise that I walked into the office, then a stone’s throw away from my apartment, seething with frustrated musical longing. Logged into Yahoo Messenger, and found a senior online. We talked for sometime. And then I decide to take him up on something that he had been talking about for months. A site called Livejournal. It was 2nd December, 2002. (I didn’t really remember the date just now, had to go look it up)

It took 3 years for my keyboard to be fixed. A colleague at the office, the same guy who was with me in The Club got it fixed through an acquaintance who was a reseller of synthesisers old and new. Ironically, I was in Bangalore when it was finally repaired, and managed to take possession only in February this year, a month after I came back to Hyderabad and about eleven months after it was working again.

Now, the important question, why all this today? Fact is, since morning, I have been listening to songs from the nineties. Most of which I had played for, onstage, or sung, or at least transcibed in my diaries. Each song has a memory, a story that makes me wistful, a wee bit melancholy, and at times, so giggly I could fall off my chair. I could talk to you about the way I sequenced the title song of Mast on my keyboard, and made the two song versions a single duet, and sang AND played the keyboard. I could tell you about the way the lead singer of “Ek Bagiya Mein”, the song from Sapney, would mispronounce the word “maina” with a thick Oriya accent, sending us into paroxysms of laughter. Or about how we took the title track from Dillagi, chopped out the slow bits and used about twelve singers for the song, establishing a kind of record in the Club. How I gave myself goosepimples on stage by singing Rahman’s interlude in Dil Hai Chhota Sa. How, after performing Vaseegara on stage one night, I heard the song being played at full volume in a hosteller’s room the next morning, and have to stop and listen to it for about a minute before I recognise it as OUR stage version. I could tell you about…

Or maybe I can just go back to listening to the songs and smile to myself.

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59 thoughts on “Skeletons in my closet

  1. Fairly decent singer, eh? I remember “Pyar toh, ona ee t-th-aaa” 8-| fairly clearly.

    Honestly, your Wrecstacy series was the best that the Music Club had ever done in the college and will be hard to beat. Really! You guys WERE awesome!

  2. Greetings!

    I have friended you, I hope you don’t mind.

    I found you as the only entry when looking for shankar-ehsaan-loy under “Interests”. And I come to find other interests we share as well. Lone Wolf and Cub, Takeshi Kitano, Akira Kuroswawa, and on…

    I have enjoyed reading so far, and look forward to more.

    Nice to meet you.

      • Anonymous says:

        Yep, it helped, da. Thanks a lot – was in a spot of bother, but all’s well and that sort of thing.

        And oh, I dont think the one word comment upstairs says all that I wanted to, so will permit myself to elaborate.

        I quite love the way you write about your past and childhood and the initial days of beatzophrenia, da.:). Makes me feel nice and good about those days of my own past that I enjoyed.

        I do feel bad about not being able to put down my own experiences as well as you manage to, but being able to look back with contentment suffices – I shant ask for too much.:). Thanks for that, da.

        Shamanth

  3. I claim solitary credit for giving up a seat on a train so that you could lug that monostrity of a synthesizer all the way to college….

    Was nice reading all that WRECatharsis….

      • The pleasure was mine!

        Seriously : write a novel about your life in REC. Just maintain a separate blog, completely private, whip out Semagic (or whatever you use) whenever the mood strikes, and keep banging at it. One day, it’ll be ready. :-)

        I do that, except I use the other blog just as a notebook. 143 pages in since Jan 1, 2006 when printed out using ljbook.com :-)) Me happy!!

  4. redirected here from ‘s journal:

    Sweet post, brings back a lot of memories of my hostel life! *adds to memories* No singer but I used to quote songs from old hindi movies on all occasions. “The right song for the right moment”, my friends used to say. :)

    ‘Suno Zaraa’ is one of my all time Favs, I always thought it’s one of the toughest songs ever to sing! It’s great you could..wow!

  5. Nice post! Man, your description of the music room sure makes me really nostalgic. We too had a Music Room in our college with its own share of secrets and mysteries that had been passed down in hushed tones from one batch to another. Do they have that in all colleges?? :)

  6. Anonymous says:

    surprising

    surprising because, I always thought you were a stage performer with keyboard even before the college days. Atleast thats what your performances in college made me believe. So, knowing that you took to stage only from college days makes me amazed at your musical instincts.

    Never had an ear for Rock music. So don’t have any favourites among your rock peformances. But you playing key board and singing that high pithced line “Dil se re…” with lot of passion is what I am always reminded of thinking about you & music.

    Looking at college days, to me it occurred that Music was your first love. Coming across so many music enthusiasts cutting albums these days, I thought I would one day see your name / face popout of one such album:-) Looks like things other than music are what you are even more good at.

    This is Harsha btw. Kalyan made me aware of this place which I am enjoying visiting.

    • Re: surprising

      Good to see you here, Harsha. :) I hadn’t really talked about my college musical days on Livejournal (or any other online medium) before. Am too embarassed about it, really.

      As far as cutting an album goes, nope. Am not that good. Am not as focussed. There. :)

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