Identity Crisis!!!

Helloooo my beetle bugs…Guess who’s back…I got a death threat from someone for not writing in more often so I thought I’d give it a try yet again…for all those who have read my last post “9 to Fine” you will be glad to know that I have left “that job”…errm I left it ages ago actually and got a “better job” and well I still echo pretty much the same sentiments as I did before so not much has changed there…so now since every piece of writing must have a purpose I’ll have to come up with something to defeat the utterly lackluster, mundane-ness of my purposeless existence…hmmmm…I’d say this is worse than a writers road-block…maybe if you are reading this and are bored to death you might want to suggest something interesting for me to write about aka shred and dissect till the subject is significantly humiliated…

The topic of todays post – is a blog post I read titled Death Metal and the Indian Identity by a certain Akshay Ahuja…this post was a suggested reading by a really good friend of mine who happens to enjoy his music quite a bit. Now for the benefit of those who want to go ahead and read the post – here is the link http://www.guernicamag.com/features/525/death_metal_and_the_indian_ide_1/ and for all those who work late and really can’t be bothered to go through a 1000 word essay on a topic they may or may not really be able to relate to I shall sum it up as briefly as possible (a little rich coming from someone who loves to wax eloquent about the smallest of things). Anyway so the blog post is basically a story about a friendship between the author and a “bad-ass rocker” called Pradyum…how they met…and became friends etc etc etc. Now the bad ass rocker boy has a semi pro death metal band predictably called Cremated Souls. Their band has a website that’s in French (because a French band liked their tape and did them some charity) and blatantly bashes the Indian appreciation for death metal, exaggerates the bands morbidity and suffering to be lapped up by those who enjoy such genres of music and has songs that “apparently” deal with “Indian” issues.

Pradyum dutifully doles out gyan to our author in a rather somber “know-it-all” fashion when he talks about forming an “identity” with your music. Upon further reading we are introduced to Pradyums classic-Indian-middle-class-mommy who doles out piping hot food from the kitchen with as much efficiency as her “rogue” son hands out pearls of his new-found wisdom. We meet the fiancée who comes home over the weekends (ok so maybe they are classic middle class bordering on liberal) and works in a call center (ahaan! Whoever doubted the classic Indian-ness of the household?)

The band members (predictably all “rogue” children of “decent-middle-class-Indian-households”) rather ingeniously attempt to make their “own identity” by painting tshirts and adopting a brazen “couldn’t care less about traditional values and Indian-ness” attitude. Even more predictably so each and every band member had a list of favorites (again a rather clichéd list of favorites…I wonder why us common folk don’t have such lists…hmmm). Pradyum was seen as an ideal band leader – determined, focused, with a perfectly formed “identity”! Now all this was a sort of flash back sequence preparing us for what was about to happen – jump to today – Pradyum and the author meet at a fest where his band (now renamed Gorified – oooo how I “totally identify” with the new name) perform a rather lackluster gig!

Jump to 1.5yrs later – the bands been dismembered (because the others weren’t “serious” enough), Pradyum – now married with a temporary “full time” job in real estate brokerage – has joined a new band that plays melo-death called Infinite Dreams…he had sold his guitar (the seven stringer with Steve Vai’s pickups) because it did not suit the “identity” of his current band…

There ends a story – or does it? We are all so eager to catagorise ourselves inorder to form an “identity” that we tend to forget who we really are. You can enjoy death metal or melo-death and yet not know how to strum a single chord…you can be a choir nerd who appreciates classic rock…outwardly appearance doesn’t matter. It is all a farce. We are what we are from the inside and not much can change that – we can pose for as long as it takes but sooner or later the truth will catch up to us and bite us in the a**. I guess Indians tend to suffer more from this “pseudo –identity-adoption-syndrome” because we are forever in awe of our western cousins and are constantly aspiring to go to “phoren”. Being a brown person isn’t seen as a good thing – why else would ladies be bleaching their hair peroxide blonde and decking up from head to toe in expensive goods from “phoren”. This article can spiral into a never ending conundrum of psychological hoo-haa about being at one with yourself and comfortable in your own skin and all that jazz but that I shall save for another discourse – for those of you who don’t know me – I hate psychology – it categorizes human behavior and stereotypes personalities according to the theories some pre-historic drunk one laid out – but that shall be saved for another rant…