Where in the world are my (blue) oysters??

So, temporarily put out of work by a damned fever, I find myself with plenty of time to write again. So I said why not write about this ‘new’ American band Blue Oyster Cult I recently discovered and am madly in love with!!!

American, mark, is the key word here. For reasons I am not able to pinpoint, 70s and onwards American rock has never particularly impressed me. Sure, Van Halen are irresistible with all their decadence and PARTY trappings, but that’s about it. Aerosmith, you say, Kiss, you say?? Nah. Sure a few songs were good but I really couldn’t see what made them so great other than their albums did very well and the critics found a more sissy and ‘acceptable’ *cough cough* alternative to the unholy trinity of Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and Scorpions, ha!! I loved Elf but that’s attributable to my idolizing of Dio. Guns and Roses??? Noooo!!! Nirvana?? Ugh!!!!

One reason these bands didn’t click with me was they seemed to interpret rock as a crassy means of entertainment and nothing more. Not for them the social outlook and musical innovation of British and European bands. But if the music was kickass, why should that matter?? True, but this shows somewhere in that the music doesn’t come across as strikingly original or even – the magic quality that Pink Floyd and The Who, among others possessed – graceful. Rush on the same side of Atlantic were writing the script for the prog metal of the 90s and Riot were laying the foundations of speed metal but that is a different story and they were never as mainstream as those American bands I mentioned.

So, when I first heard Don’t Fear The Reaper I was nothing short of stunned. It had everything – elegant chorus sections, soulful guitar leads, outstanding keyboard interludes and above all an effortless grace – that I had been looking for in American rock. After much hunting around, I got two albums Spectre and Fire of Unknown Origin and also a best-of compilation (all mp3s, I am ashamed to say). And what I had seen in that one song was repeated song after song, indeed Fire of Unknown Origin must be the one of the few rock albums in which I loved each and every track, you could do without On the Run in Dark Side of The Moon, you could do without maybe half the songs in the best UFO albums Force It and Lights Out, even Sabbath’s Vol 4 has the redundant Fx and Changes. But not here, every song is of one soul with the others and yet presents a different experience so that you are hooked till the last song Don’t Turn Your Back is over.

The secret to that is masterful songwriting. They do just about enough with the instruments to keep metal snobs like moi interested and at the same time write songs that are meaningful musically and lyrically. Musically??? Yes, they seem to know just how to build up a song so that it leaves a sweet taste in your mouth when it ends and also keeps you hooked right from the intro. Take for instance Flaming Telepaths. It opens with that intriguing piano intro leading into some wonderful chorus sections, a nice keyboard solo leading into the brilliant guitar solo, finally closing with the whole band going off in a controlled frenzy. Oxymoron, eh?? But there it is, they don’t exactly throw caution to the wind and yet close on a dramatic note.

This shows that come to think of it, writing a great rock song is not too hard, it is not about the virtuosity of the musicians but how they channel the talent. The average rock fan is not looking for a profound commentary on classical music; he/she is looking for hooks, hooks everywhere – be it the intro, be it the verse, be it the chorus, be it the climax. He/she relishes those ‘moments’ in a song which touch his heart; for me, the little piano interlude leading into the guitar solo in Flaming Telepaths is one such moment. The fun single Godzilla demonstrates their knack for songwriting even better; it manages to be light-hearted without turning inane and instead of sounding ponderous has a solid dose of irony. Lyrically too, these guys were right on the money; intelligent and thoughtful without sounding like proving their intelligence over and over was their sole mission in life. Rather than quoting passages, I suggest you to peruse of the lyrics of Astronomy or Burning For You or..heck, any of their well known songs would do.

So this begs the question: why are these guys shrouded in relative obscurity?? How has American rock come to be associated with Aerosmith and G ‘N’ R rather than Blue Oyster Cult??? The answer may lie in that the press looks for stars, for individual glory – aren’t Yuvraj’s 6 sixes talked about more than our much improving fielding throughout the championship – rather than the music itself. They look for a Steve Tyler, for a AXL Rose, for a Ace Frehley, for a Slash. You won’t find them in Blue Oyster Cult – though Bloom’s pipes and Dharma’s fretwork are hardly lacking at all. The stars of this band are the songs themselves because they reflect the passion and thought that went into crafting them.

How can I prove it?? Well, two metal bands that attempted an ill-advised full-length covers album – Metallica and Iced Earth. Both bands covered Blue Oyster Cult – Metallica covered Astronomy and Iced Earth covered Cities on Flame and Burning For You. These covers worked surprisingly well even though both bands sound nothing like Cult. In fact, they were arguably the only distinguished covers in the whole respective albums. Perhaps because Eric Bloom’s character is not imposed on these songs, ergo you don’t miss him in the cover either. Of course, both bands brought with them their characteristic crashing drums and thundering riffs which killed the gracefulness that I admire so much in the originals; yet they definitely captured the spirit of the originals better than say Metallica’s cover of Sabracadabra or Iced Earth’s cover of Number of the beast, both those songs originally recorded by great metal bands – guess who. And this is for me an admirable quality; no debates then over how the frontman ruined the band with his ego or how the guitarist doped his way to doom (sure Cult had their own troubles later on, but that’s a different story) – the only discussion possible is over the music and it takes a mighty prejudiced ear not to like this band’s music!!!

In summation, you can talk up your Beth, your Jump, your Cryin’ all you want, but show me something like Fire of Unknown Origin (song) or I love the night. Hail Blue Oyster Cult!!!!

Crown of thorns??

Hmm….as I attempt to resurrect this cobwebbed thing called my blog after a long forced hiatus, I find myself with a plethora of topics to write on. There is Chak De India the movie itself, and a refreshing change from regular Yahraj banner films if I may say so, there is Mahi’s resounding success at South Africa, there is the Sethusamudram issue, the Nuclear Deal…the adage no news is good news or bad news, doesn’t apply currently, there’s news of both kinds happening. Instead I will scribble about something that is not topical but which is interesting – for me.

You can watch her regularly on a top English news channel at primetime and particularly on Sundays. Uh huh !! She hails from a family of Kashmiri Pundits. oh yeah??? Her father was a top Dilli bureaucrat and that probably sits prettily in her resume. Tsk Tsk!!!! She was nominated for the MTV fashion awards in 2004!!! Touche!!!! I think those of who are reasonably tuned in about the television media must have guessed her identity but for those who aren’t, she’s Nidhi Razdan. Her ascendancy on the NDTV foodchain was swift and smooth as a petrol sedan (ok, ok, I haven’t gone by the Accent CRDI!!!) but once she became a top anchor and a regular feature in their primetime telecasts, it seems as if she is the subject of much holier-than-thou criticism, atleast on the internet.

I’ll return to that. Meantime, let’s talk about how she got there in the first place. I will have to now draw a self-admittedly absurd parallel because a more realistic example may not get the point across. Michael Schumacher, arguably the greatest F-1 driver of all time, started out BY filling in for the regular driver at Jordan. He didn’t even finish the race, let alone win it, but that one performance was already so impressive that there was no stopping him after that. In much the same way, Nidhi Razdan filled in when Rupali Tiwari unexpectedly called in absent. In no time, she progressed from a substitute to a regular and so on and on. In much the same fashion, she filled in for Sonia Singh and Barkha Dutt respectively on the Sunday night bulletin and the weeknightly discussion Big Story and smoothly appropriated these shows for herself.
You can well argue that it was because of daddy’s considerable weight in her resume that she made it to NDTV in the first place and that she may also have therefore got undue preference when it came to anchoring big telecasts. That may be true, but that doesn’t mean that she has not done justice to what opportunities she got. Like if Michael Schumacher had driven impetuously in that first fateful race and blown it bigtime, we probably wouldn’t even know who he was today. And here, let me indulge a bit on what I really like about her style.

Clutter. It is one of my favourite words. Why, you ask, it is hardly complimentary. Yes indeed, but it describes our times aptly. There is clutter of everything: too many ads, too many fucking cricket matches, too many channels, too many reality TV shows and all trying to imitate the other as best they can. The result, I find popular TV shows, popular charting music, popular movies in general a big turn-off and have to sift and sieve through the weeds to reap a modest harvest. In this situation, I have always felt Nidhi Razdan has a unique approach, particularly one which is much at odds with the generally Left-Leaning, verbose and Anglophilic philosophy of the channel she works for, with due respect to Mr. Prannoy Roy. She is NOT interested in sensationalising worthless issues, she is NOT interested in heated debates over deadpan topics, she doesn’t indulge her control over the medium. Instead, her point, atleast to my mind, is, simply, cut the crap. Example: There was once a news item coming in about a change in the telecom ministry’s policy and a correspondent was droning on and on about the details. She interrupted politely but firmly and decisively and asked, “But what does it all have for me? Do I have to pay more??” Bingo!!! Exactly what was going on in my mind. The correspondent’s response was predictably shorter, more lucid and effective, end of the matter, next story. Another example. When the Left was in a big row with the Congress over airport privatisation, their leaders were called on all channels for discussions and so too one X-Factor telecast had one of their motormouths on air, I forget who. He was whining ceaselessly about how the whole thing wasn’t in the Common Minimum Programme and that the Left had only agreed to support the Govt so long as they stuck to it. She interrupted sharply with one short, brutal question,”So why don’t you quit??” Ah….suddenly the motormouth runs out of petrol, unfortunately finding perchance a pump closeby and resuming the monologue. Here atleast, I thought, was journalism of some use to humanity but she would later outdo even that.

Engineering students will remember that last year, the IIT imposed a cap on the maximum number of attempts a candidate is allowed for the JEE after which he has to, simply, forget about IIT. Lo and behold, the topic was discussed on X-Factor and – straight out of Bollywood – a guy came along, ranting about the new rule and how it had demolished his dreams and that he was on the verge of -gulp!- committing suicide!!! What do you think happened? Was some IIT dean or professor or some education administrator called in and grilled about this? Was there an on-the-spot SMS poll about whether the boy was right and IIT wrong??? In the normal course of events, this is indeed what would have happened. But this was Nidhi Razdan out there and it had to take a special turn, which it did. She gently, without sounding like the overbearing elder of your nightmares, persuaded him to reconsider his decision and at the same time, never brought offence to him by trivialising his feelings or chiding him for being a wimp, in which case, he would been so drowned in shame that he might have truly taken his life. And at the end of the show came the most magical moment I have witnessed in any television discussion – the boy, albeit reluctantly, agreed to take on life afresh and pursue alternative avenues. If you are cynical, like me, you would suggest the whole thing was stage-managed. Well then, first of all, I don’t see what NDTV would have gained from it especially since they didn’t sensationalise it and secondly, if it indeed was, it was executed so well it LOOKED genuine and that’s all I care for.

So what’s so great about taking on a Keep-It-Simple-Stupid attitude? Well, how many anchors do it, if it is that simple? As a student of commerce, I can testify that often, high-flown jargon is only a curtain to hide the ignorance beneath and the true expert speaks without pretense and without any great airs about himself/herself AND in simple, basic English. I am not about to suggest that all the other top anchors across channels out there are bad, just bringing out why her style is special. You know the funda of it: on these music contests, there are guys who pull off all kinds of vocal gymnastics but when they have departed the stage, you can’t remember what song they sang…and then, there are those who take songs that SEEM to be simple and keep you hooked every moment they are singing and you too find yourself thinking about that performance for several days after. Because what SEEMS to be simple is actually very difficult to pull off without making a prize fool of yourself and doing it consistently is a fine craft.

But that’s not all. Much is made of her looks – she is most certainly a good-looker – either her place at the top is attributed entirely to her looks or she’s tagged with the cliched description “Beauty with Brains”. Wow, what a retarded epithet!!! Duh, who told you beautiful women don’t generally have brains??? Why is it an oddity if she doesn’t live up to the George Bernard Shaw joke? And then, the MTV Fashion Awards nomination. Be honest, did you ever see her adorned in anything that looked more at home on the ramp or in the filmi world than a newsroom, in fact any old workplace in a metro??? If she was nominated for something that has least to do with her job, is that necessarily an indication of her ostensible obsession with her – again – looks rather than the show to be anchored?? Well, thankfully I say, she didn’t win the award and the next year bagged an award for her journalism to boot – as if awards are the reason to watch specific shows in any case.

As for her resume, well, bad luck if that was the reason you didn’t get the job she got..but by now, there’s no point denying that she had nothing else going for her. It was not like they just asked this happy-go-lucky rich brat who had no idea of journalism to just step in to the studio one fine day because she was the daughter or Mr.XYZ. She studied mass media and by all accounts, NDTV wasn’t her first professional assignment either. You might rile the system of giving weightage to your references rather than your accomplishments but that is no blot on someone who has been there, done that for very many years by now.

I don’t believe this solitary piece will do much to shut up her super-kvlt critics..and yet, I only hope she wouldn’t have the misfortune of reading what people have to say about her…ah, the tragedy of blogging, where you can hail or lampoon even those who are not celebrities in the strict sense of the word!!!!

Chennai, will I ever understand ya?

Being a Tambram residing in Mumbai, my life basically revolves around two cities over and over. One is the city I have grown up and love dearly – Mumbai. The other is the city where most of my relatives are based and which I therefore have to visit once in a while – Chennai. For me, the two cities couldn’t be more different. I am forced to say with a heavy heart that whatever fondness the city’s name evokes in my mind is on account of my thoughts being then directed to my kith and kin. Else, well…. here we go…

I think there are two dilemmas that Chennaiites basically seem to struggle with. One is: they can find umpteen reasons to crib about their city and just as many reasons to unfavourably compare any other city with Chennai. In essence: they are not too happy with living conditions there, but see admitting that as conceding some imaginary ground to other cities. The other dilemma is: they are essentially traditional-minded but feel the need to flaunt their modernity. Result: they are liberal in thought and conservative in action.

I have made my position on these issues clear in my previous blogs: I don’t take sides with either liberalism or conservatism. As a true liberal, I leave it to the individual to decide. Likewise, I have no problems with either civic apathy or civic pride. But I do have a problem when these opposite positions are confused and confounded. It reveals to me a vacillating trait, a refusal to be pinned down to a particular stanc and a desire to seek a comfort zone in every possible situation.

Now, let’s look at this from the Chennai perspective. Go to an acquaintance’s home in Chennai and he’ll have endless complaints about his city – the water situation (which, mark, has actually improved greatly in recent years), the traffic, the filth (not much of it actually) and so on. So you think he’ll have something good to say about your city, right? Wrong. In fact, he’ll condemn your city in the harshest terms and pronounce it as all wrong in every aspect and declare himself to be much better off in Chennai.  You see, the problem for the Chennaiite is that in accepting that your city is better than his in any respect would amount to him admitting to staying in the wrong place – a mistake in life, as it were. He cannot see that urbanisation brings different problems to different degrees in different places and there’s nothing in wrong in sharing these problems. It’s no use telling him about the Mumbai – Pune expressway. He’ll point to the ECR and pick up a microscopic crack in the road surface that even the local scribes did not spot in their quest for some news. It’s no use showing him the skyscrapers at Nariman Point or the view of Marine Drive from Kamala Nehru Park because he doesn’t realise that you just want him to enjoy the view. For him, it’s all a game of one upmanship and out-of-cue he’ll compare Nariman Point to TIDEL Park and Marine Drive to the driveway along Marina Beach. Not that those don’t make for a great sight, but that’s not the point at all. In my experience, the one aspect of Chennai that its citizenry surprisingly play down is its overall cleanliness. It’s not sparkling clean and it’s got a Coovam to match our Mithi, but I find overall the city’s fairly clean and the few piles of uncleared garbage don’t intrude the eye too much. Somehow, though, Chennaiites describe their city as dirty all the time. You think I’m exagerrating the Chennai attitude? Well, here’s an example: NDTV did the same old Mumbai – Delhi debate for the nth time over once and after the topic had been flogged to death, they showed the reactions of viewers who voted for a different city. Interestingly, while citizens of other cities like Pune or Bangalore gave reasons why their citty was the best, the lady from Chennai preferred to crib about Delhi’s power and water problems and Mumbai’s long commutes as a reason why she preferred Chennai. For Chennaiites, life in all cities is miserable, but more miserable in the other metros as compared to Chennai.  

But even if I can take this immature civic pride positioning in my stride, it’s the other existential dilemmas that I find hard to digest. By existential, I don’t mean to be or not to be. But dilemmas in the course of day-to-day existence. Chennaiites are extremely superstitious, but feel the need to get on with the hustle-bustle of modern times. Now – you could either abandon superstitions since they have outlived their purpose anyway or slow down the pace of your life to accomodate the many rituals. Instead Chennaiites prefer to balance the two and bend superstitions to suit the needs of today. Once, when we were leaving for Mumbai after a visit, the train to Mumbai was departing well in the Rahukalam, meaning we had to start at an inauspicious hour. What would I do: either care a damn about it or start early and while away the time in Chennai Central reading magazines and gobblin junk food. But what we ended up doing was moving our luggage to another relative’s home before the inauspicious hour so that we had symbolically started our journey and then starting at our convenienc, baggage in tow. This again reflects the vacillating tendency. Do you really think the One Above whom you fear so much to subject yourself to this farce can’t see what you’re doing? Now, I can oblige the wishes of my relatives on such ocassional visits, but would I do it for a lifetime? No way, I’m not a rocker for nothing!

And this combination of submissiveness with deviousness is reflected wherever you go. Chennaiites are gung-ho about their city on the business front, pointing to the booming IT and automobile sectors. But they still deal in yesterday’s denominations of currency. How else can one explain the immense suspicion that the cashier at a bank subjected us to when we paid for DD worth Rs.50000  with cash in 500 rupee notes? She checked the notes over and over again and couldn’t even trust the note-counting machine that there were actually 100 notes. Finally, she relented after much huffing and puffing. In Mumbai, the transaction would have been completed with minimum of fuss. Man, you’re seriously telling me 50000 is such a big amount? Get a life!!!!

More so, they are still struggling to cope with the wave of modernity sweeping the city in the wake of its economic boom. Remember the fracas when the police sealed a hotel for allowing couples to make love in its premises? NDTV carried a special feature on the issue the same Sunday. Even the normally passive Vishnu Som lighted up and asked the Chief Commissioner of Chennai Police,” Here’s a simple question. Do you object to kissing?” The gentleman was caught off his guard by the sharp question and took a while to recover himself and mouth a politically correct response that left more questions than answers. This theme of youth rebellion v/s the traditional patriarch has been captured in several Tamil movies. Predictably, these movies were criticized severely in several quarters but lapped up by the college-going audience. In the meantime, the IT boom has brought many migrants who do not speak Tamil at home. Right on cue, this led to a flaring up of Tamil chauvinism, though thankfully good sense seems to have prevailed.

Yes, this post seems to never end. I could go on about the many contradictions of Chennai. So what’s my problem with hypocrisy? Well, firstly, I object to hypocrisy in itself. But more importantly, I have been brought up on the Mumbai philosophy of “talk less, work more”. I cannot see how a healthy corporate environment would be created for quick decision-making in the midst of so much indecision and contradiction. Maybe that explains why TVS remains the sole home-grown business success story to come out of Chennai.

Stop daydreaming, Mumbai!!!!

Vision 2020, Mumbai Vision, Roadmap for the future, Mumbai to Shanghai – daydreaming goes by many a monicker in Mumbai. Well, it happens to be the city of dreams, I guess!!! Anyway, horribly bad jokes apart, when I say Mumbai is daydreaming, I do not necessarily intend to slam the efforts to modernise the city, particularly its physical infrastructure, which has been gathering rust for donkey’s years now. Far from it, I think our vision for Mumbai is a muddled one, unclear about the city’s priorities, and hence likely to remain the stuff of dreams.

 To elaborate, Mumbai’s citizenry is unable to let go of the images by which it remembers its city and at the same time find it mighty difficult to rein in their heartburn after returning from a foreign trip and seeing and feeling the stark contrast.

 We would like BEST to never ever raise its fares, but we long for the airconditioned, air suspension comfort of a luxury bus. We think it’s mean of BMC to impose fines for spitting and littering, but we lament the fact that our city is so dirty. We like to recall how smooth the roads were abroad time and again, but we brazenly park our bikes and cars on still-being-laid concrete surfaces – and then, when they do not hold up in the monsoons, curse the BMC for doing a bad job. Like, what did you expect, anyway? We park cars on pavements and then crib at the lack of walking space on the pavements. We cry hoarse for subways and then, when they are actually built, still dare to cross the Eastern Express Highway at Pestom Sagar right under the nose of vehicles speeding down the flyover. Not only that, we cross in large groups, bringing the traffic to a halt, and on a different day, crib at the lack of discipline of pedestrians whilst ourselves sitting at the wheel. We want an end to new car registrations, but while the proposal is discussed ad nauseum by the govt, get ourselves our second, third or even fourth car. 

It’s not for me to take sides either way. I do not know for sure that it’s OK for Mumbai to remain poorly managed, unkempt and indisciplined. And I also do not know the exact benefits of modernising it on the lines of say Singapore. But I do know that if we are to modernise, we’ll have to make some sacrifices. If you want things to improve, something’s gotta give. You can add more and more flyovers and squeeze extra inches of road width, but unless the surge in the number of vehicles stops, traffic will continue to be a problem. If you can’t resist the near – involuntary urge to dump your Pepsi plastic cup on the pavement and just walk away, you will find those Pepsi cups staring back at you everywhere you go. It would be great to have new, airconditioned taxis with tamper-proof meters, but you can’t hope to pay the same fare as before.

 Prime minister Manmohan Singh said back in1991 as the then FM that there are no free lunches. Nearly seventeen years hence, we are still trying to run away from this reality. For me, this new-found squeamishness manifest in Mumbai is a real shocker. I have seen the city steadily decay through the 90s and watched the piles of garbage growing in size with every passing day. And then, the city managed to turn a corner with the new millenium. I can’t say things have improved, but they aren’t necessarily getting worse than before. At least for the moment, the rot seems to have been stemmed. 26/7 was a freak incident. At the end of the day, we have to agree that last year, the rains were indeed managed better with less disruptions and we made life more difficult for ourselves by getting paranoid everytime it poured.  Maitri Park isn’t getting cleaner by the day, but atleast it’s not getting dirtier. And yet, there’s a crib virus doing the rounds in the city which, more than anything else, makes life difficult for everybody around.

I don’t really get it: all these years, you loved this ‘dumpy’ place, but now you would like to see a change. Great! But what are you going to do about it? Take photos of the same road day after day to capture the change in pictures??? I hope something more concrete is in store. As for me, I am an outcast, a Navi Mumbaikar across the bridge and can only contribute by not adding to the pile of – shall we say it so – shit myself! Snap out of your stupor and decide which Mumbai you want and what you will do to that end. Let’s stop talking and get to work. No more roadmaps, please!!! We know our way around the city, thank you!!!!

Ladies and gentlemen, Klaus Meine

The above mentioned German is in my opinion the most under-rated rock frontman. Right, you do know who he is. At least, you heard him, in Wind of Change, Rock you like a hurricane and then maybe Still Loving You. Ya, he sings well, he’s the guy with the thick German accent, right? Unfortunately, Meine has come to be defined by his accent. But while his accented vocal delivery did help distinguish his band Scorpions’ style, that’s not all there is to Klaus Meine.

     First, let’s take his voice. Very few rock frontmen, with the exception of Freddie Mercury, David Gilmour and Ronnie James Dio, have such a pure voice. No fooling around with the nose for Mr.Meine. His voice comes through crystal clear. For all his much-vaunted German accent, I can sometimes make out the lyrics merely by listening to him, without reading them on the web.  Plus, there’s a unique combination of tenderness and masculinity in his voice. He can tear your heart apart with the soft passages of We’ll burn the sky. At the same time, he is your machoman when he belts out the chorus,”Rocked you like a hurricane”. Sure you did, Meine, and how! He has phenomenal range which gives him depth in the low register and power in the high register. Even in the hard rock numbers in their most recent album Unbreakable, he never seemed to run out of steam. And he was 56 when he sung those songs. Can ya beat that!!!!

     But a God-given voice alone can’t take you far unless you have a great vocal technique to back it. Here too, it’s mighty difficult to fault der German. Even in the band’s tepid showing post Love At First Sting, this guy’s vocal delivery saved the cliched assembly-line hard rockers. You really have to hand it to a guy who could inject so much life into as dull a rocker as Tease me, Please me. I actually thought for a minute, “Is this Sir Paul Mc Caurtney on the microphone?” Yeah, you heard me, Beatles fans. Meine is that good. He finds power where he needs it, catcalls he can do even if his mouth were to be plastered and finally, he can just deliver the vocals cleanly and normally with passion and finesse.

   But even with all that, he could have under-achieved enormously but for his versatility. But not Klaus Meine. You name it, he’s done it. Ain’t nobody to beat him when it comes to love ballads, we all know THAT. But, he can also scream his heart out Robert Plant-esque, go operatic aka Bruce Dickinson (say Sails of Charon, which, by the way, was recorded four years before Number of the beast), get as muscular as James Hetfield (say Bad boys running wild), and so on. Yeah, he can’t hiss like a vampire the way Alexi of Children of Bodom does. Big deal, huh! Even that’s only for want of trying, I reckon.

But the final testimony to his greatness is his ability on stage. Today noon, I was watching a telecast of Guns N Roses’ live performances in Tokyo. And I couldn’t believe AXL Rose could sound so awful on stage. The only reason I bore with him was I didn’t want to miss Slash’s wonderful solos. Man, was I happy when he stopped running wildly when he took the piano for November Rain. After all, he would then concentrate more on his singing!!!! But when it comes to Meine, no cover-up acts in the recording studio for him. He’s as good in his live performances as he’s in the studio, no better, no worse.  His voice sounds the same in the live collection Acoustica and the studio cut Unbreakable. If it were not for the audience cheering before the songs, I would never know Scorpions were playing live.

   It is often said Scorpions would be nowhere without Klaus Meine. This statement is made without considering the abilities of the other band members who were/are all excellent, even legendary, in their craft. The point is that Klaus Meine could make or break any band. He would become such an indispensable part of any band he joined that without him, the band would have to shut shop in no time. He just happened to be Scorpions’ frontman. He was meant for rock in any case.

The affluent, lawless, conservative Indian

 India is on a roll, economically. In a year from now, there will be two malls within walking distance of my home and in all six malls in my locality. Sedans outnumber small cars these days on Mumbai roads during rush hour. Even beggars seem to have different sets of clothes. Things couldn’t get better,right? Wrong. Look at the other side. Sex ratios in many states, particularly Punjab, couldn’t be more skewed. The increasing number of rape crimes is justified in some quarters as a reaction to the dress sense of the victims. Riots, protests and hooliganism break out at the most trivial of provocations. Courts are busy attending to PILs against acts purported to be immoral and vulgar and generally detrimental to society. There is a paradox of economic prosperity and increasing intolerance in society for each other and any kind of differences between persons.

   Conventional wisdom says that with greater economic prosperity, people would seek to upgrade their standards of living, better educate themselves and move from traditional value-sets to accomodate the changed economic scenario. The opposite appears to be true for India. With money, people want to impose their value-sets on their neighbourhoods and to hell with the rest.

  In Mumbai, the Indian fountain of liberalism, if you are any one of these kinds of people, you could have problems getting a place to stay. I’m not saying nobody will accomodate you, BUT that you could be in for some tiresome hunting and some rude words as well:

• If you are a meat-eater, as the fanatical veggies call them.
• If you have dogs as pets, particularly big, scary ones like Alsatians, Dobermanns and Great Danes.
• If you are female and single and don’t live with your parents.
• If you are in the modelling or acting profession (yes! Bollywood seems to be unwelcome in its own den)

   The list could go on, but this illustrates my point. There is widespread intolerance for ‘kinds’ of people and ‘kinds’ of behaviour. Entire apartment complexes are being dedicated to single linguistic or religious communities. You could get pulled up for lip contact with the opposite sex at the Marine Drive. So, what’s my problem with that? Well, does anybody pull up love-making dogs for the same ‘crime’?

    OK, OK, I heard your protests. My point is this kind of moral policing and intolerance is justified as being for the greater good of society. Oh, really!!! A schoolteacher in Mumbai has ensured that you cannot watch A-rated movies on TV channels as it spoils the kids. So what are filmmakers doing? Getting the censor board to pass all movies as U or U/A. Already, Vettaiyadu Vilayadu, the Tamil blockbuster was released with a U/A certificate. How? I mean, when I watched Lost World as a kid in a cinema hall, ‘homo’ meant one and only thing to me – homo sapiens!!!!! Missie, you have only given the censor board and the multiplex owners a new source of income.

     That is not all. When obstacles to one’s course are sought to be removed, people don’t seem to have any qualms about breaking the law. In Mumbai, of late, signals are being broken with alarming regularity. Some enterprising autorickshaw drivers even hoodwink the traffic cops and jump right under their nose. Educated, middle class people break queues at railway counters. As far as I can tell, I have stood in longer queues than the ones that they tried to break. But, these days deadline comes foremost, to hell with some stupid rules. Whoever invented them must be shot!

    This ponderous combination of wealth, intolerance and anarchy can be put down to that Shakespearan line, “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown”. Today, Indians are well-fed, secure and comfortable. But rather than eating to our hearts’ content, we are paranoid that we may go hungry again.  That one day, we may have to trade our brand new duplexes, sedans, Plasma TVs et al for chawls, overflowing local trains and transistors again. And anything that goes against the norm is seen as a threat to our new-found prosperity and nipped in the bud. Dissent is no longer seen as a symbol of a healthy democracy, rather the perpetrator of dissent is viewed as an enemy and assaulted.

   For me, the new wave of intolerance in Mumbai, specifically, is a cause of concern. Mumbai keeps going on without rest only because its citizens are tolerant of each others’ presence around them. I shudder to think what would happen if everybody hurls abuses at each other when they rub shoulders inadvertently in crowded trains. Such physical contact is generally unavoidable due to the cramped conditions and if the unavoidable needs to be avoided, we are heading for disaster. Again, it is said that in ten years time, 50% of Indians will live in cities. What will be the reaction of the new migrants to the liberal value-sets in cities? Since they will likely outnumber long-time residents of the cities, will they attempt to force their conservative values on the cities instead of embracing the new world? Already, our cities are reflecting this trend to an extent as the new prosperous migrants who made it without the struggle and sweat their predecessors underwent in harder times are less inclined to take the city’s culture in their stride, forget about being a part of it. No, they build their own exclusive enclaves, their cocoons of comfort to get away from the mean city-people. And when they meet more of their ilk, they join hands and take the fight to the enemy camp.

      And so our shining, world beating India is making headlines everyday: for riots, for rape cases, for road accidents, for murders and for PILs. Let’s all raise a toast to the good times that we live in. Continue day-dreaming, India!!!

P.S: In case you think this is outrageous and unpatriotic, arise from your slumber, dude. I care!