Mom goes Pop

Having been brought up in the backwaters of Madhya Pradesh, my taste in music ran largely into old film songs.

Having been brought up in the backwaters of Madhya Pradesh, my taste in music ran largely into old film songs. The burly Philips radio in the living room of our home doled out dulcet melodies all day long. I particularly looked forward to a programme called ‘Sangeetika’, a 15-minute musical prelude to the national news in the mornings.

Father, too, was addicted to film music and loved it at full volume. But mother’s tolerance for music was just slightly more than Aurangzeb’s. She found loud music particularly jarring. So whenever she passed by the radio she would reduce the volume and when I happened to be around, I would raise it again. This cat-and-mouse game would continue until it was time for me to leave for college.

Western music, however, remained alien. My brothers who had taken a liking to it played it on the small tape recorder in their room. Its strains reached my ears, too, but I remained largely indifferent to its charms. My first brush with their tape recorder came when my husband gifted me a set of Jim Reeves tapes after our engagement. But I remained singularly uninformed about western music and could not, for the life of me, make out the difference between pop, rock and rap.

When my daughter grew up, she started listening to strange sounds on our music system. Now I found myself on the other end of the game of volume adjustment. One afternoon, recently, my daughter decided to bridge the generational music gap. She gave me a crash course on ‘her’ type of music. She played some of her favourite numbers downloaded from the Internet and explained each song to me. She also gave me some idea about the various bands and the distinct features of their music. Her words opened my ears to pop, rock, rap and reggae. ‘Hotel California’ became an instant favourite. But just when we had begun to bond musically, she had to leave us for her higher studies. But I am happy about the lesson she taught me. How could music, which transcends geographical, cultural and other barriers, keep the generations apart?