The new year eve night was spent on these lines, out in the crowd after a while this time. It's been long. It’s been quite sometime. It’s been incessantly frequent lately. My tryst with rock began a decade ago and it had to come a full circle on this decade-ending night.
Rock n Roll culture had never been relevant during an upbringing and an exposure filled with the archetype of a quintessential perfect society/family/culture. Mom's heartfelt renditions, the old hindi classics, the nadeem shrawans, the jatin lalits and the kumar sanus, the tablas, the harmoniams were all that could come under the musical purview. It was nascent and full. Life was nascent and full. The trails leading onto rock-star-dom however were lingering on, and the door was eventually opened with the advent of 21st century.
The tryst began with the flings: the Boyzones, the Bryan Adams, the Beatles, the Bon Jovis, the Guns n Roses and finally the MetallicA! There's been no looking back since. The fling turned into a full term wedding. The guitar made its way in. The heavy playing pubs/cafes became the routines. The whiskeys and the pitchers, the outlooks endowed with the 'killer' touch and the freaky-urban-lingoes helped explore the all-crazy-happening space - the space beyond the lesser, 'uncool' breeds.. the space beyond the hypocrites.. the space beyond the forced cultural values.. the space beyond the clichés.. Well this was it - the space of us the Rockstars!
Dwelling on, we could see everything drawing a leaf out of its 'blood' laden catalog.. And by 'blood' we mean the naked self! The raw parasite within - the one crawling up the fake materialistic body imbibed relentlessly by the world's hypothetical preachings - the dark, depraved, evil creed the mankind pathetically refuses to lay its eyes on. Yeah by 'blood' we also mean the 'attitude', self indulgence and revolt. We are in a way much more than those stereotypes of the gory devil worshipers. We are in a way the ones 'You' strive to run away from, every single day.. Yeah it’s 'Sad.. but True'!
This hardcore fascination was here to stay. It made further inroads courtesy the much perceived sorry state of affairs of the social crooks. The sarcasm of the 'bloody' mind was now looking down upon the lesser, uncool breeds with even greater disdain. We, and hence in turn I, seemed like a different league all together. A league not everyone could dare in. The night leading the decade's farewell was infused full with this brutal long-found glory. The reverberations of its legacy kept buzzing on.
However, shockingly that night there were others all round! The others, who didn't belong there. I felt an increasingly horrifying paranoia as the clock kept ticking in, seconds closer to the d-hour. They were all there. Those fucking wannabes. There would be senseless ruckus, un-religious head bangings, non-brutal screamings - everything condemnable in the revered 'Rock' community. My paranoia colliding with this unruly hysteria thus created an insurmountable numbness. The lesser breeds had intruded into our space and what I was visioning that very moment was exactly the opposite of the apposite bandwagon I had made my journey into a decade ago. Well a Metallica number started hitting the floor in the background but the numbness was heinous - for the first time in a decade it didn't quite whip the adrenaline thrust. Looking around, developed an uncanny deja vu. Between the silhouettes of the raised 'V's (rather the devil horns) against the blurring low lights, there I saw a moron trying hard to cling on, to something he thinks is grandeur, eccentric.. perhaps close to a decade now. Well the countdown had begun. And then just before the final tick it seemed I strived for one final bid to run away… from him!
Phew… Life was indeed nascent and full then..
