First uttered at the SM post "Smoke On The Vater", and slightly edited for clarity

I gave up on sleep for a whole winter at an Indian college when the hall band, prepping for a western musical competition, decided to set shop in the great outdoors, right under my dorm window. Hearing The Police's "Message In A Bottle" a gazillion times, performed with various degrees of badness, made me turn reactionary; so I refused to be educated in the finer points of Led Zep's "Staircase" or Pink Floyd's "The Wall" in my college years. I had to wait a couple of years till I made my crossing across the Black Water to inject myself with classic rock, which really does rock compared to inane junk on contemporary radio.

As others have already pointed out or implied previously, the incidence of such retro tastes, media-wise (in music and books), in India has to with economics more than anything else. CDs were practically no existent in back in the days (I speak for the 90s), and much of rock traffic in colleges was on borrowed copies of the original tapes, which were usually imported, and held by their owners in communal trust.

Ayn Rand's desi reach can be explained by the availability of her books as very cheap pirated paperbacks, which one can buy from the "footpath" booksellers. For example, I paid Rs. 30 for my copy of her "Fountainhead" vs. Rs. 400 I paid to buy Vikram Seth's "A Suitable Boy" in paperback, in the late 90s. I don't know if she would have been happy with such a subversion of her intellectual property; I would be thrilled if the stuff I might write hits that "footpath" market even though I realize would have to mingle with an august company of “writers” such as Jackie Collins, John Grisham etc.

I think the circulation of western music is much better these days in the desh, given cyberia and Bit Torrent, even though the availability of "good" books at "desi" prices is still quite dismal. Here a shout out to Penguin India: how many firkin' kids (or parents) can afford to pay approximately Rs. 1000 for an omnibus volume of Satyajit Ray's stories (an example chosen because this was a gift I gave an cousin, who is in middle school, when I was visiting desh a couple of years ago) when the average annual family income in India (an optimistic number) is Rs. 100,000?

Re: sillymidoff @ 35 Ah yes, thanks for mentioning Boney-M - their "Greatest Hits" was one of the earliest tapes my father bought soon after buying a tape deck in 1984. And one of the fondest memories of my childhood is that of my pre-school sister dancing to their "Brown Girl In The Ring". I think you are also right in that Boney-M's as well as that of Bryan Adams's popularity in the desh has to do with the desi ear being able to easily comprehend most of their singing. Oh! And it must have been "The college whose name shall not be spoken" Bombay, Delhi, Kanpur etc - there was (is) no IIT in Bangalore.

Re: risible @ 44 While Shammi Kapoor is (maybe?) dead, I think Bollywood does booming business here in the videsh with its minstrel circuit - posters advertising shows, for example, of Aishwarya Rai and Hirtik Roshan, in which they lip-sync and dance live, greet me regularly when I dine at desi restaurants here. Of course, A.R. Rahman took this peddling a level higher with his musical "Bombay Dreams".

As for Indian classical arts - yes, they are much stronger, both teaching and performance-wise, here in the US than in India, mainly because American desis can afford to send their kids to learn Bharatnatyam or the tabla from the many excellent teachers and artists who have migrated here, following the money. I think T.S. Eliot summed this phenomenon up best (I quote from memory): "Art can only flourish in the dung heap of cash".

This is what I most want unpursued, alone to reach beyond the light that I am furthest from.

And for you to shine there- no other happiness- and learn, from starlight, what its fire might suggest.

A star burns as a star, light becomes light, because our murmuring strengthens us, and warms the night.

And I want to say to you my little one, whispering, I can only lift you towards the light by means of this babbling.

Note: When I absolutely need to speak to myself (and perhaps with the hope that these murmurings will reach the other) words of consolation, I turn to this man, Osip, who was fully alive to "the flame in the blood". The knowledge about his brutal death, on reading his brief poetic biography in "The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam" (translations by W.S. Merwin and Clarence Brown) made me write a kaddish for him, that evening as I walked out of that bookstore, my hands shaking. This I want to say to you, my little one...