Music and I go a long way (away from each other)

I have never been a great singer leave alone being a music lover. I say this because when I last sang, people said I was reading. The only deaf person in the audience loved the speech I delivered before I started singing (she was lip-reading)….but turned away when I started singing. I am so bad at singing that when I sing even lip-reading can be noise.

But I am not to be blamed for being a music-dyslexic. For my interest in music (or lack of it) was built on an old, single-speaker National Panasonic tape-recorder (yes…that is what we used to call them) which my father bought after saving money for two years. Whenever I felt like listening to music, I would play the single audio cleaning tape which came along with the tape-recorder. It was five months before we played an actual movie tape – I remember because we invited my uncles and aunts for the occasion. Coming from such a family, you should be happy to just know that I don’t think ‘Sonu Nigam’ is a girl.

In order to nurture an interest in music, I started attending Musicals and Operas but my experimentation ended abruptly. I was in an Opera House, and I let out an involuntary radish-fart. If you visit Opera Houses, I suggest never fart because they have great acoustics and even a small ‘puff’ ends up being a ‘boom’. A non-Rajan can definitely not handle 1000 pairs of eyes turning towards them….more so because spotlights in modern Opera houses track sound and focus on the person…in milliseconds. The actors refused to continue till I left the Opera House. My friend, who stayed back, confirmed the power of what a single person can achieve in the society by saying: “Did you know…all of us were smelling of radish when we got out?”

I then decided that learning a musical instrument would help me ease into the music loving circles. Being a big fan of Bagpiper Whiskey, I decided to become a Bagpiper.

After three months of effort, I decided would never become a good bagpiper (and no it wasn’t about wearing a skirt). I just didn’t know when I was placing my fingers on the wrong holes of the pipe. If I were a candyman, and I placed my hand on the wrong box of candies the customer would have said: “No! Not that one…the one to your right.” But with bagpipes the audience never knew.

With years, my respect for music has gone down. All those music reality shows, notwithstanding…. I have no respect for music (while Rekha has too much of it).

I did listen to Yanni for hours, once. Five years back, when I was really down emotionally, I listened to him for four hours at a stretch….and when that didn’t work out, I started looking for my father’s pistol. Like it happens in anybody’s house…my father’s pistol was also missing. Apparently, my 10 year old nephew had taken it to his school for some shooting.

But please don’t go by what I have said about singing & music. They are definitely better than they sound.

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