A Pig's Life!

Hi,
    I am writing about an event which I saw happen right outside my house. The reaction to the event was immediate though it has taken me a lot of time to write about it. Initially, I wanted to write a song about it, but I just couldn't frame the subject matter in the manner I wanted to because some of it is not conducive to song material, but I haven't given up on the idea just yet. Maybe writing about this might clear up the roadblocks.
 
    Ok, I stay in a relatively remote location on the outskirts of Jamshedpur, as a matter of fact, the flat we stay in is the last bit of heavy duty construction in the direction. After that, it's all thatched houses or one-off bungalows. Just out of the boundary walls of our housing complex are a couple of thatched roof houses and the families that stay there. They raise chickens and a couple of pigs apart from whatever it is they do for a living.

   I was reading the newspaper one morning when I heard real loud shrieks from the pigs. I didn't want to pay attention at first, but a minute or so of continuous shrieking later, curiosity got the better of me and I went to my window to have a look. I saw that there were four men with ropes and sticks and were trying to subdue one of the pigs so as to tie it's legs together. The truck they came in was parked a few metres away. After another minute or so they had tied the limbs together and were ready to cart the pig away to the truck. All the time they were physically on top of the pig trying to subdue it, the screams were immense. The moment they let go of him, the pig stopped his screaming, which was funny to me because it's legs were tied together, was it only the physical threat that caused it's fear, was the much greater shackling not a factor here?

 Nevertheless, as they slung the pig onto the pole and were carrying it to the truck, I started noticing a few other things, because my mind had already started running. The other pig, his brother, maintained a small amount of distance, but far more important, maintained his silence the entire time. That struck me as fairly odd. I noticed that the truck was full of pigs, similarly tied and on their way to inevitable doom, yet not a peep from any of them either. Is the threat only really serious when it is that close, if you can't see your immediate doom then you have no reason to be afraid?

Now that they had put the first pig in the back of the truck they came back for the second. This is when the second set of screams started. The men tried to get on top of the pig and subdue him, same routine as before. Just that, on the basis of incredible struggle and strength, the second pig wrenched free of their grip and raced away, only for me to see that they had managed to tie their rope around ont of his legs, so he wouldn't get far. The pig ran to a distance, and then was stopped, since his rope ran out, but he never started screaming.
 Again, I found that very odd, does the pig not realize it's trapped? Is the threat only worthy of a notable response when it is immediate? Nevertheless, the men adapted a different approach to subduing this pig. No longe did they go directly after him, because they already had him on their rope. Now they would let the pig do their work for them. One of the men had a staff, with which he prodded the pig, who at the time was running back and forth along the arc that the rope was allowing him. After being prodded, the pig modified it's direction. This exercise continued till the pig was actually prodded right into the back of the truck and the pig itself jumped into the truck, all with minimum screaming and effort. All the other pigs maintained their silence throughout.

Now that's the story, and this was my reaction to it. This might reek of confirmation bias to some, so I'll get that out of the way first. The moment I saw this, I compared it to the life of the youth of our country. For years they are left to their devices, with no real training or information to deal with the real world, and then we are thrust out into the meat-grinder with no real alternatives, skills or choices. Once confronted with the real world, most of us immediately protest once the threat is upon us, but are not really sympathetic to anyone else's cause save ours. And once the threat has been made, the writing is on the wall, then the protest stops and this weird acceptance creeps into the system, one which is vastly more disheartening than the feeling of protest.

 Now there are some who will submit directly to the system, their initial protest a feeble and short-lived burst of adrenaline. Some will fight and try to escape the system, never realizing that the system has a grasp on them and has had it for as long as the system has deemed it necessary. All their efforts, while pursuing liberation in their mind, are in fact making the job of the system easier in subduing them. The end result remains the same. The system wins. I realize that the time between seeing and writing this has adversely affected my enthusiasm for the event, and I've retold it to a few people with quite a bit more irony in my delivery. Hmmm, interesting. As someone who is often struggling to stay away from the system, I wonder if I am feeding it directly with my lifeforce, God I hope not.

Yo Yo Honey Singh! The Champion of Urban India?

Hi,
    For those who have read previous entries to my blog, the title must surely come as somewhat of a shocker. I urge you to read on, and vent post reading. A few things out of the way before I begin; firstly, I have not heard all of Yo Yo Honey Singh's songs, only a few, don't know which one's he has sung, and have not heard them in efforts to research for this train of thought. Secondly, I have not used Wikipedia or the internet to research various aspects of his life, because quite frankly, I don't care much about his past or beginnings.

  For those who haven't read my blog and don't know why I am writing this about their hero; I'm a pro-musician, have been playing guitar for the last 17 years and am very curious to know how you got to know about this article. Is it because it has to do with Yo Yo Honey Singh?

   Now on to  what I want to write about. It's about Yo Yo Honey Singh. If you haven't heard of him while you have access to the internet and TV in India, then you are part of an overwhelming minority, or are trapped under a rock. I'll be using the abbreviation YYHS to refer to him for the rest of this article, because it's tedious to type out his full name, and he does insist that Yo Yo is a part of his name. He's a singer who is the flavour of the season, and what a strong flavour he is too. It is difficult to move anywhere in India without running into the legend of YYHS. I want to narrate a couple of anecdotes before I launch into my analysis. For the past year, I had been acting as tour manager for Bollywood soul diva Shilpa Rao, and as such my phone number was made public, which resulted in a lot of phone calls and messages from her fans in and out of the country, they who wanted to speak to her, profess their love to her, marry her, meet her, give her their lyrics, the whole nine yards. Two calls stand out in memory for their disconnection to Shilpa Rao. It was almost in the same manner, I'd get a call, it was a male once and a female the other time. They told me they were huge fans of Shilpa Rao, I offered to deliver a message to her from them. They hesitated, told me it wasn't necessary, and then went on to ask for YYHS' number. I would inform them that I didn't have his number, they'd ask me to ask Shilpa Rao if she did. And as a rib, I narrated the entire incident to her, and asked her whether she had YYHS' number. She burst out laughing and said she didn't.

   That's the impact this man has on the masses of our country at the present time. He has reached a level of visibility and success that has hitherto been unseen. He's on TV shows as a guest, he's on TV adverts, and he has just been given his own show on the Star Network, where he'll be a mentor to those who are looking for the opportunity to showcase their songs to millions. This kind of stardom is unprecedented. Those who have been industry stalwarts in the past, have not had the exact same path. Daler Mehndi blazed a trail in the mid-nineties, but due to the lack of the internet and TV exposure at the time, he didn't quite get where YYHS is at now, had Daler been here now, it might have been a different tale, but we'll never know. Jal, the Pakistani band who was at the hearts of everything romantic in the mid 2000s didn't quite reach YYHS' level as well. In the information age, a simple look at the Facebook stats of artists reveals his reach. His Facebook page has 24 million likes, which is ahead of Aamir Khan, SRK, Salman Khan, Amitabh Bachchan, Sonu Nigam, A R Rahman, Shreya Ghoshal, Sunidhi Chauhan, Lata Mangeshkar, Sachin Tendulkar, and pretty much everyone else Indian.

   So what is it about YYHS that has captured the imagination of the nation? I know for a fact that he has a vast number of detractors too, especially in the demographic of parents who are concerned as to the result his lyrics have on their impressionable children. I also know that his isn't the most musical act in town. His live performances are more show than substance, so why is it that people don't care for the negatives and seek out this man, whose positives are hard to find and harder to explain. My opinion on my own question came to me while I was listening to 'Khoj' an album made by Delhi band 'Antariksh'. I feel 'Khoj' is an amazing album, and quite different to most Hindi rock acts of past and present, yet whenever I shared the album with my friends, most of them have been lukewarm to the band and their album, citing various reasons as to why they didn't like it. So it was while listening to the album, that I did a quick mental check for the songs of 'Khoj' against the songs of YYHS that I'd heard and I formed concrete opinions as to why YYHS works like a charm.

     I had first heard of YYHS when he was just HS and hadn't begun to YY between his house and the bank collecting ludicrous sums of money. I was in college, so almost 7-8 years ago, and there was a song which was all the rage. It was titled 'C***', a (Hindi?) word which translates to a certain part of the female anatomy. The lyrics were filth, and obviously, captivated all the guys in my hostel, and in the college in general, and across all colleges too I would think. Here's a guy, who is basically talking about a guy's innermost primal feelings, in the innermost primal language, that which is normally used after lusty drinking sessions and such, with the exception that it is not on any inner level at all. He's loud, proud and completely unabashed in his lyric, his delivery and his clear desire to get as many people to hear it as possible. I'm sure that his lyric isn't quite as crass anymore, but I have heard some of the complaints from parents about a lyric to do with '4 bottle vodka' or some such, while he was on Kapil Sharma's family friendly comedy TV show. By the way, Kapil Sharma's Facebook following is also behind YYHS' and this guy has the highest rated non-fiction TV show in India today.

   Therein lies the charm of YYHS. He is essentially what India is growing into. Our country is a juxtaposition of a schooling system which champions fear, decency and hard work for continued minimal success, and a political system which will choke you till your eyes pop out. As a result, most of young urban India, while having jobs that pay their bills, and put food on their plates, are in a state of almost constant disillusionment, and with no forum to express their frustration. The kids are taught English at school, asked to use English in the workplace and in every professional interaction, yet they are far more comfortable in a tongue that is neither Hindi, nor English, nor Punjabi. Young Indians are now most comfortable in the tongue of abuse. Abusive remarks are used like punctuation, language no bar, I have seen that in English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Oriya, Bangla, everywhere. I'm a musician who's had to travel a lot, and I've studied in a college where students from all stratas and states come to study, believe me, I've seen this for years, being a constant F-word user myself.

   This is also a time when young Indians, despite the frustrations, are in fact more confident in their own ability than ever before, and part of the frustration has to do with non-utilization of that ability. That's a dangerous mix if you think of it, confidence, which has come from years of education, hard-work and an iron-will, matched up with a society whose extreme pragmatism wants to confine the same confiidence it has bred. What results is a youth, whose inner-mind is extremely volatile, fractured and looking for a space to release. This is where YYHS steps in.

   He's not the most skilled musician in the world, he probably isn't the most skilled musician in his house, but let's face it, YYHS, isn't selling just music, he's selling himself. The sheer outrageousness of adding the Yo Yo to his name, which might be dumb to anyone who stops to think about it, is now the biggest separating factor between him and his contemporaries. He has a stage-name that trumps all stage names. This is no pen-name, no pseudonym, no Bachchan, or even no Eminem. This is as basic as branding gets, add something you associate immediately with the genre of rap and hip-hop to your name. And there you have it, Yo Yo Honey Singh. The sheer brazenness of it is what I think is so attractive. In a society where the youth are constantly encouraged to cross their T's and dot their I's, to maintain their social standing at all costs, here is a guy who creates an all new social standing for himself, as good a dream as any for the young Indian.

  It doesn't stop there, aiding YYHS' juggernaut is the incredible role that social media plays in the life of urban India today. I saw a married couple at a coffee joint where for the first ten minutes both husband and wife were just texting on their phones, then the wife showed something on her phone to her husband, following which she went back to her phone, the husband started and finished a call, and then proceeded to stare out the window, their coffees came, were consumed and they left. My 9 year old cousin knows which is a timeline photo, which is a profile photo, and going closer to home, told me yesterday 'You don't know about Yo Yo Honey Singh, where've you been, don't you know we all love him?' These aren't isolated cases I'm sure, as can be evidenced by his tremendous following on social media.

   So there you have it. A guy, whose pretense is that he makes no pretense. What he thinks is what he says, and if it is foolish, rough around the edges, rustic, then it's your problem to deal with, not his. If the music isn't great, or lyrically stimulating in the traditional sense, again, deal with it. If the live performances aren't great or really true, again, deal with it. Which I think is exactly what young India wants to portray to the entire world. We're here, and we're taking over, and deal with it.

PS. I'm not a fan, just an analysis of what I can see.