Don’t look away from the abyss, If you do, you can never acknowledge it exists. It’s not as much outside us as within us. Recognize this. The only way out of it Is to march through it. To live it is to embrace it. It may hurt, such wounding is necessary, Those are the required marks. People forget that history repeats itself, The cost of forgetting is too high.

You ask me what can you do about it? You can do nothing. But you can try to be human. You can weep at such breaking, Remember when you do this very carefully Because you are not as much weeping at such meaninglessness As much as recognizing that such a beast exists Within each one of us. You will know when it flashes, In anger and in shame, when you can’t bear to look At your own face in the mirror. You will cry out, Aloud, why this way, why this now, first to Mom And then to God. This is the common denominator, this is what makes us, men of spirit and white bone.

I was reading an essay of rail travel by Paul Theroux and that remained me of my own travels on rail. As a person who lived in a third world country for the beginning two decades of my life, I guess I had my share of railway travel and some memories about those journeys.

I have a very faint memory of my first railway trip when I was around four. We had gone to a temple town about 700 miles from our house for a pilgrimage when my sister was still a little girl. I don’t recall many details of this journey except that I distinctly recall the engine was an old fashioned steam engine: black, cylindrical and beautiful. And history buffs would recall the fact that the Industrial Revolution, and thus the form of the current world, was shaped by James Watt’s invention of a precursor of such an engine.

Another memory I had of railways as a kid, was that of a boy who lived next door to us. He wanted to a train driver when he grew up and on many a evening he used to sit at the window and make the “coo choo” music as he, I suppose, imagined his train leaving the Hyderabad station. There was also a very popular song in my mother tongue, “Charminar Station Gaadi Raajalingo”, which describes if I recall well, what a villager would find as he arrives to the big city. I grew up in a time when India was transitioning from predominantly rural to more urban and I personally am only a generation away from a farm. So I suppose rail journeys became a part of the larger psyche. And then I wished that my parents’ villages were father from the city in which where I grew up, so that we could take a train rather than the usual overnight bus to visit our grandparents.

The next trip that comes to my mind, is one we took to visit an aunt who lives in a sea side city about 400 miles away. It was in this trip that my father bought me my first novel in English, R.K. Narayan’s Swami and Friends, at O.H. Wheeler at the Secundrabad station. Even though the book is now very yellow and had been mended a couple of times, I still have it with me. I hope I can introduce my children to the love of reading by giving them this book on a long train journey. While we were at our aunt’s house, our group of kids, a set of our cousins, went to a nearby neighbors home to watch a Hindi movie. This wasn’t because the neighbor invited us, but because in 80’s India, very few people had TV, whose fare consisted of a single channel which broadcast one movie a week. Anyways I mention this movie because in the final scene of this movie, the villain, (who was responsible for killing a dad leading to the separation of three brothers and their mother from one another), gets killed by a train as the brothers watch on.

Trains in India have three classes: the first/AC class, the second class (also called the sleeper class) and the third class (more genteelly called the general class). A lower middle class family like ours usually traveled in the second class. A coupe in a second class compartment seats and sleeps 8 people. There are two long seats which face one another which 3 seats each, a passage way and then two small seats facing one another which seat one person each. On the longer side, the back of the seats can be lifted up and secured by chains from the top to form a bunk bed at night. Above this and two feet from the roof, is a permanent bunk bed. Third class compartments had no bunks to sleep on and since there is no limit on how many people can get into them, I have had the honor to travel a) standing up for a whole night, b) sitting on the steps of the train, holding on to dear life, c) sitting in a corner of a bench, wedged next to the window, with four more people sitting next to me (the bench’s capacity is 3), d) hunched in the small luggage rack above the bench. Gandhi in his auto biography wrote that to see and experience India first hand, travel in third class is indispensable. This journey is shown in that stellar Oscar winning bio epic, Gandhi. And I must say he is not far off from the mark with that observation for real India does travel in the third class. I can’t describe how the inside of an AC/first class compartment looks like because in my 21 years of rail travel, I was never rich enough(AC in India is generally for the seriously rich folks) to travel in an AC compartment. But I think given how the windows of an AC compartment always seemed to be misted up, I suppose I didn’t miss too many views.

The next journey I recall is when my family went on a tourist trip, my first “travel for pleasure” experience, to Bangalore, Mysore and Ooty one summer with three other families. One thing that most people do when they travel in India is that they carry their own kitchen with them. This is not because meals are not available on trains, (they are, however they are not well prepared for what they cost) but because dining in a train is supposed to be just like eating at home, especially on a festive scale. I remember my mom used to always prepare dishes that were cooked on festivals, for train journeys. I suppose given the frequency with which we could afford to travel, train journeys and holiday trips ranked among the occasions demanding celebratory cooking. That trip was fun because for all of us kids (there were 5 of us from three families) it was our first adventure. And I think we had enough window seats for all of us because there was no fighting. What a kid requires on a train is a window seat, take that away and you will have one mad kid.

It was wonderful to wake up next morning (we had boarded the train around 7.00 pm the previous evening) to find myself in a different state and a changed landscape. I remember standing at the door as I brushed my teeth (there are two sinks and four toilets for 72 people in a second class compartment, people sit in the toilets in a third class compartments, so they are unusable) and grinning at bullock carts waiting at various railway crossings. All the while the grown ups were fretting about the train running late by about six hours (Indian Railways takes that Zen saying to heart: it’s better to travel than to arrive!), we kids had fun running up and down the compartment and looking out of the window. I don’t recall how the return train journey ended; perhaps this is because the return is not as exciting as the departure.

Then in class nine, I as a part of the high school nerds contingent got to go to a science camp (in India, “arts” like language, history etc are a dirty word meant for losers who don’t want to go anywhere in life) in another state about 700 miles from home. This journey required us to travel through Bombay (or Mumbai as it is now called). The few highlights of this trip were the train passes through a hilly section (called the Western Ghats section) about 100 miles from Bombay. So it winds up and down the hills passing through quite a few tunnels. For someone who hasn’t been through a tunnel, it’s eerily exciting and fun. We all started making ghost noises and in the process did manage to scare a few women, who then made the teachers going along with us stop doing that. As an aside Western Ghats are now one of the most ecologically endangered places in the world. Another observation was that all the rich people from Bombay, had these huge palace like estates in the most impossible and remote mountain sides in these hills. The British had invented the concept of hill station in India, wherein they escaped to the cooler hills and mountain locale to escape the killer heat of the plains. And for the people with the cash this is still in vogue.

Coming down from these scenic hills nothing prepared me for the shock of arriving at Bombay. One arrives in Bombay not when he disembarks at the Victoria Terminus (now patriotically and for political reasons renamed to Chatrapathi Shivaji Terminus) but when he sees the first slum 3 feet from his train window. And these begin at least 50 miles away from the station. I had never seen poverty (apart from the usual beggars who turned up in our neighborhoods who went begging door to door, usually early in the morning for food) on such a scale before in my life. As one of my friends observed, Bombay is India concentrated into a capsule, where everything good and bad is magnified to the extremes. So I was shocked when I saw slums which sprawled for miles and then in the middle of these 20 storied apartment complexes rising like lighthouses in a sea of dirt and despair.

After miles of such slums, one arrives at Victoria Terminus, a huge Gothic building with clock towers, spires, fluted arches and what have you, one of the legacies of India once being a part of the British On-Which-the-sun-never-set Empire. And since we had arrived at what was the rush hour, under these arches we were among a sea of humanity which mostly sprints. It was a surreal experience for a boy, who lived in a village like neighborhood to be in middle of that mass. It was here I saw people jumping on a train as it pulls away and begins to attain speed for the first time, an acrobatic feat which if missed would mean certain death under the train wheels. One of our teachers, who lived in Bombay before, told us that people die that way yet the speed of life precludes them from acting any different.

From Bombay we caught a mail train (a mail train is a train which stops at every station, stations include a big tree with just a sign board next to it) to our final destination. And since this train had no classes, this was also my first taste of travel in the third class. Since we were then small enough, we crouched and sat in the over head luggage rack. Underneath us, the regulars (who thus occupied all the seats) had set up an elaborate table out of discarded cardboard boxes and were soon playing a mean game of poker involving significant amount of money. It was on this journey I wrote my first lines of verse which are now (thankfully!) lost. I showed these to my parents who patted me on my head and asked me to watch out for those quadratic equations. I suppose they were right in their own way because it was perhaps those equations which afforded my subsequent escape to America.

The next time to travel and which route I would travel for the next four years was when I left home to go to college, 1000 miles and a 30-36 hour train journey from home.

I come to this telling of memory again after watching a movie, the Pianist. His hands moved over the piano and created beauty. And since my hands can’t move over this key board, at least not tonight, with the same kind of music, I suspend this telling here. Renaldo Arenas in a poem called The Procession Begins, writes of the music of his typewriter as words raise like music on a blank page. I have felt that kind of music on days arrive unexpectedly. And when it arrives, it enables me to move beyond myself to touch something that is untarnished. Perhaps its hope that enables man to live in spite of everything, perhaps it’s something that is so beautiful that it can’t be named.

So last night I hit town again for a concert ( a part of On The Bricks series) of Blues Traveler. It had rained heavily all of the afternoon and I wasn’t sure if it would stop but then it did stop right on dot. So off I marched the 1.5 miles to the Olympic Park, paid up my $3 (they started charging admission this year, but it’s still an ok amount for a poor mouse like le moi), and got in to soak myself in an aural energy field.

There was a band playing when I got there, three down from the headliners. They played ok music even though their sound wasn’t real tight and shit. There was only a sparse crowd around this time, 7.30 pm-ish. Then as they were changing the stuff up on stage for the next band, I wandered around in the park as it had been some time since I had last been there. As parks go, it’s not really my idea of a park, so it’s more of a memorial for the Olympics that happened in this city back in 1996.

Again as usual I was perhaps among the handful of people in the park who were Lone Rangers. And I thought about that some. I had been to a few concerts with random folks I had managed to round up. In the first instance they found the music to be too loud, read not too “pop”/Britney Spear-ish/romantic ballad-ish for them. In another instance, folks had more fun watching people make out and behave as they usually do in large teenage hormone filled crowds. While I must admit this is an ok way to pass time in between music, when music starts playing, you better start digging it man or you are wasting ya life! And incase of a real large group, folks sat down in a group somewhere in the lawn, in a circle, as if they were there for some kind of a lawn picnic and then I had to detach myself from them anyway to jump into the aural well. So in conclusion, I have come to the undeniable fact that the best way to tackle concerts is the Lone Ranger way. I might reconsider this if I, by random chance, fall in with some idiot, in K’s words, “Who feels music is not a set of pretty notes, but as a wonderful state of mind”.

Yup before we go on to the music again, my demographic observations are as follows:

< 10 1% 10-12 5% 12-14 25% 14-16 40% 16-18 10% 18-22 15%

22 4%

So I must say that I felt very distinguished and grey at the temples.

Then the music started up again. It was a band/guy called Will Hoge. He said he was from Tennessee. He drawled a bit as he was singing which confirmed it. He had good energy, jumped around a bit, interacted with the crowd a little more. Music wise I wouldn’t say he was remarkable, mainly because his music sounded like most of the music on what they call New Rock Radio. Themes: Folks screwing around, screwing each other up, screwing one self. Very uplifting and very generic. The problem with such songs is that they don’t have a geographical context, they don’t have roots. And music (or art) without roots, usually, is not well nourished and lacks a distinctive flavor.

He also had this habit of playing other songs, example “Georgia on my mind”, Ennimem‘s stuff etc as intro to his own songs, an interesting trick to sorta catch the attention of the indifferent concert-goer. He finally redeemed himself by playing an acoustic song for his baby girl. It was nice because the sun was going setting in the rain washed sky and turning all the wispy clouds traveling in the evening as into wine drifting over blue waters. The lights of the Downtown skyscrapers also started coming and the set was over.

Again a break of 20-25 minutes. And I had to go, you know, so I went. Then debated if I should spend about $5 on getting me a small coke but then I spied a water fountain, so off I went and drank some of God’s own liquid. I lay down on the platform near the end fountain and watched the evening sky: the sun going down further, clouds floating over the tops of the towers and as they do, smoky lighted plumes trailing off the tower tops. And all this, as always much more beautiful than the people on the field who were trying too hard, via the latest name brand clothes and styles, to arrive at.

Then the music started up again. This time it was the turn to Drive By Truckers, made up for five good ol Southern boys. And they played some excellent music with a solid guitar section. Even though they didn’t look much like rock stars, and I could see that the tweety birds on the field didn’t think they are too hot because of this, they made some beautiful beautiful music, to which one can close one’s eyes and get carried away in the guitar waves. I thought they being compared to Lynayrd Skynard, the quintessential southern rock band, is richly well deserved. I highly recommend their show to anyone.

All this time I began in row 3 or 4 from the stage and slowly moved up to row 2. There were some high school kids, a boy and girl, in front of me against the railing. They began making out, kissing etc, towards the last quarter of the Truckers set. And after the set was over, as we were waiting for Blues Traveler to come on stage, it proceeded into semi fore play stage. I guess they were too turned on to stay, so they left. Which was good because I got to take their place right against the railing. Nothing between me and the music. Yes!

And then we waited and waited, I was perhaps the only non-“pale face” in the front row. Maybe it’s my own perception, but I suspect these suburban high school kids must be wondering, what this old fogey is doing at the front row. Usually people don’t like front rows because it gets loud there. But since my purpose is to feel my body vibrate to the music I like front rows. And more importantly since the most hardcore fans of any band gather right there, it’s hard not to feel their passion rub off on oneself.

Then Blues Traveler came on stage with John Popper playing one of his long long riffs on the harmonica. As one of very good friends remarked the other days, he is a large man who plays a very small instrument. Usually one doesn’t think that a harmonica can be used in the same way as say as a guitar. Well Popper is the man who can and does disabuse anyone of that notion of dismissing it too lightly. I saw BT last year at the same festival and they were even better this year. Solid musicians they are whose passion for music comes across in what they do. And of course all the hardcore “homies” at the front were digging da man.

A few things that happened were, I was lost in that music, I was leaning into the music, as if I were riding into a headwind, a loss of presence of time, an absorption into those tunes which at once is also a release. My hamstring which was giving me trouble stopped giving me trouble. Bob Marley was right, with music there can be no more pain. Then next time I was woken from this spell was when a hardcore fan next to me was invited backstage, 2 songs from the end. And his place was taken by a girl, perhaps 13 or 14 years old. I could see right away that she would be trouble.

And she proved me right by throwing herself at me and urging me to dance which for her translated into doing the grind. I wanted none of that. So I tried to laugh her off. And when that didn’t work, I closed my eyes to her. All I wanted to do and feel was music. But she was a persistent kid, running her fingers over my legs, rubbing her body once in a while to my side, touching my face, trying to provoke me. I was perhaps more sad than angry, for one somehow acting in a sexual manner with complete strangers is not my style and then because she was just a young girl who could possibly get badly hurt because of her actions. But I didn’t know how to tell her that, tell her to watch out. I turned away and started doing my own thing as I was doing all evening. The next time I came out of the trance, I saw that she was doing the grind with some other guy who was grabbing her. And an older man was leering at her still undeveloped body, with which she was trying to be provocative with. I don’t know what is that we miss most of all in our lives, perhaps our inability to give love blocked by our incapacity to accept love. She had touched my face and I should say that I did miss that feeling of being touched.

All these thoughts I had later because at that point music was still more powerful that all that ancillary stuff. And it was over. BT came out and played a long encore and then left. I walked back home, strode down more exactly, after midnight and immediately fell asleep.

So that is my music update. Oh I am going back next Friday to take on Soul Asylum and I hope they play “Runaway Train”.

Peace Out!