By Nitesh Baskaran
My write-ups have always been in the tone of “how you should ask
everybody to go screw themselves” or
something similar. I
digress from such a propensity of mine to talk of such deep passions that very
few understand or at least that’s how it seems to me.
We have all questioned the meaning of our existence at some point in
our lives. And if this exercise was performed with certain curtness to the
system of logic, it is certain to depress you deeply. It is only when you
escape to the more mundane matters of life that you can quell that deep
sadness and the yearning for the truth. It must be done in order to preserve
your own sanity. It is in such realms that I find music to exist in, like an
ethereal mist, shielding you from the Reaper inside.
I personally don’t believe in souls or God or any of those poetic
theories created to quench the ‘superficial thirst’. But I do believe in beauty
and structure, because they exist in my mind. Their reality is immaterial. The kind
that makes a profound appeal to you, the kind that seems like a calling. But, don’t get me wrong. I am not saying
music actually means something more; it’s just that our naive mind perceives it as such. It is that naiveté that saves you from slow, chronic destruction.
Music; and I mean the kind that almost perished in the late 80s and is
barely thriving, was one of those things that you could cling to for a high
when you desperately need something to hold on to, something to live for. The
pleasure derived from such an indulgence could convince any mortal to go on,
even if to an unknown end. A Psychologist would call this an incentive and I
don’t disagree, I would add that some tracks are far more compelling than the others.
The tracks composed and written by Jefferson Airplane, Pink Floyd and Led
Zeppelin, all fall into that rare category that can excite you into a plane of
living : one where the world and its endless chatter seems muted and numbed,
inconsequential to your existence and like a dream that you could forever sleep
in, a Matrix that you created.
All this might seem way out there, and I concede it is a teensy bit
gay. Well, nothing I say will convince you otherwise, for it is a world of
dream and imagination that some choose to wrap themselves in, when reality is
just not enough and they’re in need of something more. Music consoles their
chaos, like an indescribable beauty that needs no explanation.
