Bahara

Where is rock music? It’s my favourite kind of music other than Indian classical, both Hindustani and Carnatic. Rock was kind of mainstream just a decade ago or so. Even Bollywood used to have rock arrangements and poof it’s all gone. I grew up on Pakistani rock bands, Call, Jal, Raeth, Strings and others. There were Indian rock bands too, Euphoria, Indus Creed, Motherjane, Indian Ocean. All of it gone from mainstream. Mainstream now just has cheap rehashes of old songs or item numbers. I only see rock music on YouTube now, but I guess it might be alive, I don’t know for sure. Society has really stratified in the past decade, and I suppose common people are now being deprived from music too, because of course an average rock fan can’t really afford to go see his favourite rock band in some elite Gurgaon pub. Thank god for YouTube though, classics of Raeth, Jal, Strings and Call are available and one can visit them if they want. We live in times where no art can be authentic. The situation is akin to the video of Navarasam from Thaikkudum Bridge, watch it if you haven’t. I love rock, but we are dealing with a bigger problem here and the damage has been done, and we can’t go back now. No art can survive what has happened in the past decade and what has been happening. Artists are nothing but prostitutes now. It’s a sad state of affairs but I guess it has been like this since a long time, it’s just due to the internet we are able to see the actual state of artists. I kid you not I saw Tom Morello, the lead guitarist for Rage Against The Machine selling his guitar course on Masterclass and you have to realise that when Rage Against The Machine has no options left, situation is really dire. Indian Ocean, the band is going through an internal spat regarding royalties. The Local Train, a new and promising band broke up. This shit is getting serious. Even Bollywood doesn’t use rock compositions anymore, not of the good kind anyway. I would have been fooled into thinking it’s changing times if I didn’t know the truth. It’s deprivation. There is not much that can be done about it anymore. The next few decades are going to be fun. It’d be fun to see how making the country a torture and deprivation chamber plays out. Let’s change the topic for a bit, you realise that India has intelligence agencies, both internal and external, don’t you? How come so many people are being scammed of their hard-earned money then? Back to the topic now, I’m glad that classical music doesn’t have copyright. I would suggest you try carnatic, you’ll love it.