Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Jagjit Singh

And now when you are gone, we can start this obituary with any of those couplets which you weaved to our heart, to our emotion of daily life or to the lack of it.Perhaps that will be like hitting a brick wall with truckload of cliches , specially while remembering a man who proved to be a toned down and 'soothing-to-ear' version of Howard Roark for a century old genre of music.
I can not remember any one couplet that you sang to me. They fritter and fret, take form of butterflies whose dusty wings, if touched, break into sadness of another earth.
They come in a flock. sometimes as colorful as laughter of few dead children from century of happiness, sometimes like the beggar's rags, each little pore talking of life in a rainy day.
And you sang to me. Choosing one couplet from Ghalib and balancing with one of Gulzar, using words of Gods which human's going to forget very soon, bringing works from some oblivious pens at the tips of each lover's tongue, you were that rebel to change the way we hum to our loneliness forever.
And now we uttered loneliness. When I first heard you, on another un-anchored afternoon , restless from the mindless cruelty of heavy metal, an uninvited song filled up my little room with a velvet like serenity. Then there was no stopping until the day dream dried and the purgatory of real life broke my little jar of liquid phosphorus.You still remained somewhere like a dessert in the course of daily life to compensate the otherwise tiring and tasteless meal. You filled up the windows of my car when heat of August swarmed like an old man's rage against death, when a dozing office looked like resting place of world's all the clowns, when my restless day with fleeting attention tried to hold on to a pillowfull of present moment.
And there will be no one. To read Ghazal to me, to put me into sleep with ancient lyrics of longing, to put hope in a hopeless place.
And all these gibberish, all these conscious mourning...someday they will become a song. They will fill the empty sky when a voice--bowed down to the lyrics yet touching each Lavz as memory's first taste of saliva from another woman--sing them to us like hymn of the sun worshipers. That song is worth waiting for. That song to find a place where he can sing without a care in the world, he can sing while playing with each turn and twits of Ghazal,he can sing when the world suddenly becomes a quieter place.
And in that misty morning of quietness, in the other side of chaos and survival, in the next coffee break from the drudgery of purging my soul from the dust and grease of modern times, I choose to live with my personal Jagjit Singh.