RX for a sore throat: Vitamin C, sunshine, salt-water gargle, a playlist of happy songs.

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".

Searching for fuel to support my insomnia (I couldn't read any more), I was YouTubing, when I happened upon this Tamil song - "Merke Merke", sung by Shankar Mahadevan, and composed by Yuvan Shankar Raja. Even though my comprehension of Tamil is very marginal, this song has such a strong melodic line that I kept playing it repeatedly, in a loop.

Yuvan, as I learnt this morning, is Mastero Illu's (Ilaiyaraaja's) youngest son, and has been making music in the South Indian movie scene for the past three or four years. My preliminary auditory experience tells me that Yuvan is a chip off the old block; this is evident in the way he welds Carnatic raga-influenced melodic lines with western orchestration, and in the way he layers his melodies with very desi sounding rythms. Further, he doesn't let the rythm section in his compositions overwhelm and supercede the basic melody, as it often happens in A.R. Rahman's music[1].

This became even more evident to me as I listened to "Kanpaesum Varthaigal" from "7/G Rainbow Colony"[2] (a movie for which he won a Filmfare Award) with glints (especially that rustic sounding beat and melody following the brief rain interlude, and the accordion's embroidery) of Ilaiyaraaja's best music[3]. I will now be on the look out for more of this kind of nice - Raja nice.

[1] I don't know if it is only me but this obscuring of melody, I think, might be the main reason why I rarely recall any of Rahman's songs from memory unlike many of Ilaiyaraaja's songs.