Children of pop

Our education and what the elders call "values" are both based on what we revere as classical culture. But whether we like it or not, most of us are children of pop culture.u00a0 We are inundated by songs, advertisements, films, newspapers and magazines, and radio and television, and they pose a big challenge to what we have learnt at school.

Which is perhaps why we swing between classical and popular cultures, convinced that the two can never meet. The songs a majority of us hear are the movie songs we hear on FM radio (and not so much a Balamurali or a Bhimsen Joshi), and the heroes we look up to hail more from the tinsel world than from the world of real-life achievers. Our textbooks try to instill in us respect for thinkers, saints, philosophers, freedom fighters, scientists and poetsu2026 but we're happier idolising models, actors, reality show winners, rock stars, and business tycoons who may have taken short cuts to affluence. If you work for the government, you may have pictures of Gandhi and Ambedkar at your office, but at home, your pin-ups are likely to have infinitesimally less illustrious people.

But things may not be as watertight as we believe. The classical and the pop co-exist in all of us.
Instead of generalizing, let me speak for myself. I grew up listening to a bit of Karnatak classical music, thanks to my parents' love of M S Subbulakshmi, and as I stepped into college, a cousin introduced me to the wonderful music of Hindustani music. But all along, I had also heard a lot of film music in Kannada, Hindi and Tamil. I heard some pop... Abba, BoneyM, the Bee Gees and such other bands popular in the '80s. While I did get to read some books that are described as classics, I also devoured less famous contemporary writing, besides pulp fiction, comics, and the glossies. I am puzzled by people for whom it is one or the other, classical or popular. For me, it has been both, sometimes more of one than the other, but never just one.

Experiment

Last week, some of us friends and hobbyist musicians tried a little experiment.u00a0 We took some verses from 12th century Kannada poetry, set them to Indian-sounding tunes, and put them in what you could loosely call a rock setting (guitars and drums). We presented nine vachanas at Kala Mandira, an art school in south Bangalore. We had expected the small audience to be startled by the experiment, since vachanas are mystical poems usually sung in the south Indian and north Indian ragas. A couple of writers, such as G K Govinda Rao and Shudra Srinivas, were upset, and recalled the beautiful melodies that Pandit Mallikarjun Mansoor had composed for vachanas. They found us lacking in meditativeness. Many equally well-known writers, such as Marulasiddappa sprang to our defence. Ki Ram Nagaraj, the famous literary critic, said it was in keeping with the spirit of the vachanas to experiment. Not all vachanas are meditative, he reminded the audience.

Two things occurred to me. One: Some were disappointed that they had found no raga-style contemplation in rock. That would perhaps be the equivalent of rock fans faulting Indian raga music for not being loud or energetic enough for headbanging. Two: we had blatantly poured out our classical and popular influences into our songs, but many preferred them kept separate.