Music or Cheap Thrills

The Big Fat Indian wedding has hit us, so dive people before you sink in the quagmire. This is a season played again and again with loud music, bright colors and ostentatious display of money and wealth and what better place than North India. We like it OTT (over the top) and then the music which rules the roost and the louder the better blaring it on the Geri route. All the music that is played has sexual undertones and we love it. We listen to the background music because it satisfies some primeval animal urge in us. The paan wallah, the nukkad wali dukaan, the hi- fi night club Dj mix, everywhere the music plays with the some subtle, and some blatant lyrics.

The media loves to examine this and then pass judgment and throw the person into the slammer aka Honey Singh.

Are we all not guilty of the crime? Are we not conveniently shifting blame and passing judgment too soon?  We have had the worst ending to a year whereby a young girl was raped brutally and left to die with her friend in the open in this cold whereby the response time of the Police and the passerby’s is the biggest blot of shame. After, the death and the nation wide protest we have targeted Honey Singh, a rapper who has been giving music to the masses targeting an audience which laps up his music of his genre.

All of us love the beat, Bollywood seems to be playing it and it’s like the proverbial honey that is attracting the bees.

Are we all so gullible? Do we get instigated, intoxicated by the music that we go around raping people?  Sukhbir Samra, a professional from London, says We listen and read what we want to listen and read!! This choice is influenced by one's upbringing, by one's personality, by one's parents and teacher's. If the reading of holy books (which is read every morning and evening in all the villages, towns and cities) from centuries failed to make us saints then surely Honey Singh cannot spoil us!! We are what we are...........

It is sheer hypocrisy to say that his music has affected the masses bringing this on. We all are guilty of this collectively; we have given rise to these phenomena. Just blaming him for this is shifting the blame and sidestepping the issue.

Ginny Arora, an activist from Lucknow and a mother of two young beautiful girls aptly sums it by saying,’ we are wasting our energies by focusing on him, they’re more important issues at hand. One can switch off the channel and walk off. ‘

The market has made him successful, and the companies’ cash on his success to the youth by making him more viral than ever. In this age of hi-tech where everything is downloaded before we can say,’What ‘? . If his lyrics are vulgar, it is because we want them to be says a Professor Sumeet Gill.

The choice is always in our hands. Musicians like him who shock, or use sex, or demean women and degrade them have been around for ages for e.g.: Chamkila, Didar Sandhu who are of the crudest kind. This music is temporary and they all pass into the annals of history with just a whimper and do not leave a mark.

Music is food for the soul and has for ages been used for sadhana to the Gods, It is sad that the moral degradation has struck the masses that we like titillations of the senses via cheap vulgar music.  A civilisation which has given birth to the ragas of the world is sinking and drowning in the instant gratification by derogatory lyrics.

The choice is always in one’s hands. By banning his music /song the unbelievable response that he got gave an increase in the sales! It seemed that fuelling the controversy helped him more than ever. The society, its sensibilities are all at stake and by striking at one singularly will not stem the rot. The rot has to stop from within to initiate the change we so urgently require.

In a country where we worship God men/bapus with equal fervor, elect bigoted narrow-minded ministers to seats of power, they are the ones who need to be sorted. The music still lifts the soul but the satsang where by innocent public is fooled into thinking that if the girl should have been religious it would not have happened.

Where is the reasoning /logic in this? This mentality is more dangerous and we need to stop this first rather than the music.

The effective way would be to have a stricter censor board that would check the lyrics and would not be a puppet straddled with inefficiency and corruption.