Music is oxygen for my soul. Some music is playing about 90% of my day. I’m basically a music whale. I live underwater in it and only surface for important work. Whales come up to breathe. I stop the music and get on stage.
And from down there, I have a few musical conundrums.
Hyderabad’s painted flyovers are one of the nicest things the city has done. The footballers at Gachibowli are stunning, with some peak detailing. The artist even got the individual strands of hair right. Then there’s the piano on the Masab Tank flyover. A real piano has 7 white keys and 5 black keys in every octave. His has 4 black and 2 white. That’s not a keyboard. That’s a barcode.
I’ve also seen guitars with no strings. That’s not a guitar, that’s a mace. Flutes with 25 holes. That’s not an instrument, that’s a plumbing issue.
Our films are worse. First they make a dummy instrument, then they play chords that don’t exist on it. You hire a fight master so a punch looks real. Why can’t you hire a music tutor for one day? You already have a music director. Just ask him to come down and supervise the actor while he’s ‘playing.’ Why is Hrithik Roshan tickling the guitar in every song where he’s supposed to be playing it?
I know I’m expecting too much from a civilisation that can’t sing Happy Birthday in one scale. At every cake cutting I’ve been to, the number of scales always exceeds the number of candles on the cake.
Fine, you can’t sing. But at least hire a good musician.
Our weddings promise a minimum of 100 dishes. Music? One instrument. Drums. If the family is rich, 4 drums. If they have serious black money, a trumpet, just to annoy us more.
Drums were the first instrument humans ever made. Ten thousand years of evolution, one industrial revolution, and we’re still hitting a skin with a stick and calling it a day. Level up, humans.
Eminem once said he makes elevating music while others make elevator music. For years I thought he was dissing Beethoven. Until I found out who Beethoven was, I had only heard him in lifts, in washrooms, and in cars reversing.
The man wrote ‘Für Elise,’ a love letter to a woman. We use it to announce that a Maruti is backing into you.
I get it. It’s classical, it’s great, and it’s out of copyright, so we use it wherever we like. Thank god these legends aren’t alive to see this. Imagine someone walking up to Beethoven and saying, “Thank you sir, your music really helps with my bowel movements.”
We have two great classical schools of music, Hindustani and Carnatic. And most schools don’t teach music at all. So we have musicians with no jobs and schools with no music. Somebody please introduce them to each other and make this world a better place.
Sandesh
@msgfromsandesh
(This comedian is here to tell funny stories about Hyderabad)
(The writer’s views are his own)