The quest for music, and other trifles

I read somewhere sometime back that music is the fourth basic need of man. Irrespective of whether it’s true or not, music is one thing that I couldn’t live without. I guess it’s the case with many of us who are willingly or unwillingly put up in a room with a multitude of books, a comp, a music system and some newspapers/magazines around. As three out of the four things I’ve listed tend to bore normal humans, and since I am a normal human, I keep falling back to movies and music for entertainment. While I may sound like a big time music buff, in reality I’m not. It all started some 6 years back. That was the time the MP3 revolution in India was at its peak, and there wasn’t much in the name of music. Not the least in the cities where I grew up. English music was only about Michael Jackson or Madonna or Backstreet Boys. Blokes who listened to English music were thought of as public nuisance - a.k.a showoffs. Plus, with the creepy computer speakers I had during those days, rock wasn’t such an appealing thing to listen to. Neither did it appeal to my parents. Slow music was much more clear and soothing.

But then, gone are those old ignorant days. As spurious music and pirated MP3s took an upper hand, I started admiring relatively milder versions of rock. With the supposedly blazing music system I have now (2600 watts quoted - real wattage unknown) I’m starting to like lot more varieties of music. At times, I guess a perfect combination of power and clarity makes any music (even noise!) sound good. That’s happened to me once or twice. Someone suddenly says I’m listening to crap, and I suddenly start to realize the ‘crappiness’ in the music. Wonder whether it’s all in the expectations. Now, of all the music, I like Pink Floyd the most. I’m frequently accused of not opening myself to other music, but then, I’m so infatuated with Floyd that most of the other bands seem to be lacking in something. The other bands are either too much of metal, or very slow moving, or very less music, or shouting top of the voice, or hard on ears, or just plain noise. I’m making a conscious effort to listen and appreciate other bands – I am a big buff of the likes of Metallica, U2, Bryan Adams, Enigma, Led Zep, Queen etc – but in the end, for some intangible reason, I keep falling back to Floyd, and I’m not even able to explain why. Guess some music is made for some people. What a change in an otherwise drab life!

In the meantime, less important things (like end term exams) are going on. Just one more paper left, and we’ll all be free-birds, off to places close to paradise. The papers,barring a few, have been really weird. Some were real tough, and some were… well, I don’t know how they were. We were asked to formulate: a strategy for positioning Suzuki Samurai in the marketing exam, a plan for introducing JIT in an assembly processing unit (in Operations exam), a plan help out a quisling accountant in taking Cost accounting decisions, a future recommendations plan for a company after analyzing 40 tables of statistical data. All the papers more or less required application of the logic, going beyond what’s in the books. Taking two exams per day is getting real tough – considering that some papers like Macroeconomics are so squeezed that a normal 1 year schedule in a regular Business course has been tight fitted in a 4-month timeline. Glad that we just have one exam tomorrow – Finance. Then, for once, it’s freedom at midday.