A Love I'll Never Loose (To The Divine Gift of Music)

Love, obsession, liking; it must have all started long back, perhaps in those days when music and Vividh Bharti were synonymous. My journey with music has been long, from those nights of ‘Pryajoit Karyakram’ on Vividh Bharti to this vast ocean of musical riches Internet. I progressed through the times of a single speaker tape recorder as a kid to a those of a two-in-one in my early teens. The Videocon walkman that I possessed as a college teenager consolidated this association and though I didn’t have that sort of a personal relationship with the big Kenwood music system back home, I share fond memories of preparing for GATE while listening to it. Those were the building blocks of my musical journey that blossomed with me finally getting a comp. And here I am now, sitting in States, far from the sounds of my country.

I don’t have any great liking for America, nor do I have any dislikes. I think for most times, my times in America have passed though the motions. However, immersed between studies and a up-and-down personal life, one aspect of me that progressed was my likeness for music. I say likeness and not understanding, because honestly I cant claim to know music. But I do know how to like it, how to feel it. It was not a conscious effort to widen my musical sensibilities, but it did happen. Faster internet connection, access to a vast resource of music at the public library, interaction with music enthusiasts sharing similar tastes; in those aspects America did more for me than I expected.

Often, my friends have dismissed certain music on grounds that it is from a certain region, in a certain language or created/sung by a certain individual; and often I have wondered, is music of a country, for a particular set of people or classified as so-and-so.

On many of my experiences with music, I have realized that I am crying, tears running down my cheeks, and I wonder why is that. In Sufism, the great masters talk about the heightened divine experience achieved on the magical powers of the music. Divine is a subjective term, loosely defined. I wonder what is divine, but isn’t it divine that while listening to ‘My Sweet Lord’ by George Harrison, I feel elevated, I feel connected to the ones I love and I feel happy about the fact that I have experienced the feeling of love. Isn’t it magic that I listen to Tinariwen or Boubacar Traore and my tears start to roll even though I have no clue what meaning the words carry. A certain Korean song, I don’t even know what it is called, makes me excited and nostalgic about the childhood that’s now left only in the old photographs. I listen to Celtic folks and I feel the Violin strings cutting my heart like a knife, a pain that only music is able to create. I see Goddess Saraswati blessing Abida Parveen as she sings of eternal love of god and I visualize Mirabai singing to Lord Krishna as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan sings “Sanson ki mala mein simaroon main pee ka naam”. It doesn’t matter to me if it’s the Swedish band Opeth singing melodic death metal or Moody Blues crooning one of their poetry soaked silken ballad, for they all stir my soul by the sheer brilliance of their music.

In times such as these, I realize that music transcends all boundaries, all limits; no religion, no language can lay claim to it, its for all and its omnipresent just like god is. Music is a blessing for the humanity to cherish and its marvels are for all to reap and its sin to dismiss based on these attributes the divine blessing that’s music.