Would you like to be rain?
Nanda Malini’s Pawana was dated. For
the most part. It was a period-relevant album. It swept across the
smouldering hearts of some sections of the Sri Lankan youth in the late
eighties. That album was a rough cut and deliberately so. It was
irresponsible in a way because Nanda Malini and her lyricists ought to
have known better the kinds of heart and minds that would embrace the
songs and in what way
Would you like to be rain?
There is a reason why the songs in Shravanaaradhana, Yathra and
Sathyaye Geethaya are remembered and those in Pawana are not. The other
day quite by chance I ‘caught’ one song from the album while I was
flipping radio stations. Vahinnata hekinam (If I could rain). I thought
back on Pawana and found that there was only one other song that I
remembered: Sanda Eliya Gangak Wee (Moonlight like a river). I felt
these two songs compensated adequately for the rest of the collection.
Pawana was a call to action. It was not a lyrical appeal but an
unadulterated command with a threat, ‘if you are not with me, you are
with them; if you don’t act, you are complicit’. It was not spelled out
in those terms, but that’s how it was read by its principal interpreters
and those who popularized the album. Vahinnata hekinam was different
though.
Nanda Malini |
I thought and thought about ‘revolutionary’ songs, the literature
that brings people to politics and about the literature that politics
direct them towards. I am sure everyone has his/her favourite ‘Radical
Song’, that radicalizing score and verse which invariably bring smile
and even tear upon recollection whilst spending the cynical years. I am
not sure what came first, literature or politics, but they sure did and
do feel one another. I remembered Gunadasa Kapuge’s Sabanda api kandu
novemu (Friend, let us not be like mountains).
Poetic commemoration
Both these songs were not about the how of political action. They
were about why. They championed a way of being, spoke of choice and
recommended in an unobtrusive manner. It was so gentle that the message
just seeped through skin and was deposited in the tender marrow of
sensibility, not for a day or year, not for that shining hour of
sacrifice, glory and poetic commemoration, but for the day-in-day-out of
lifetime and beyond.
Why be like mountains trying to outreach each other, when we can be
like a family of clear springs flowing into one large river, Kapuge
asks. Why be like a nightmare that disturbs a child’s sleep when you can
be a song that awakens a nation from a deep slumber, he asks again. Let
us not be like the insane flame that sets fire to the thicket, but be
like the soft rain that falls upon and douses such fires, he recommends.
Nanda Malini’s Wahinnata hekinam echoes the same sentiments: ‘If only
I could rain from above drought-scorched terrain, if only I could cook
like a pot of rice in a hut where rice is not getting cooked!’
Looking back, it is clear we had a choice and we as a generation and
a society of challengers and defenders, and all those who were caught in
the clash of weaponry because they were born in the wrong decade or
found themselves at the wrong place suffered to the tune of 60,000
deaths. That was not a time of soft rain falling, but one of rain forest
youth being cut down and burnt; not a time of rice cooking but frying
alive of hope and dream.
Through it all, I cannot help feeling, that a cart was put before a
horse; that literature was approached through politics and therefore
only its ‘purely political’ message was extracted and its larger call
for recognition and exploration of humanity was missed or ignored or
both.
Classical music
I remember a medical student from Peradeniya. He was not inclined to
engage in politics. He played chess. He was a voracious consumer of
literature, English, Sinhala and translations of books published in the
Soviet Union. He loved all kinds of music. He cultivated a taste for
classical music. He was caught in the fires of the late eighties. The
political visited his heart and left him without a choice. He became an
activist and an organizer. He was in charge of a sector. Not a single
person under him was arrested because he assigned only such tasks that
fell within that person’s capacities and political readiness. As a
result he had to take greater risks. He was arrested. Beaten.
Fortunately this happened before mis-directed ill-winds turned
smouldering coals into raging fires. He was released. He left Sri Lanka.
He is not a well-established surgeon. I think it all happened this way
and not any other because he came to politics through art and not the
other way about.
He was, sadly, the exception. The ‘rule’ was his polar opposite. At
some point, in the rush of blood and power, the intersection of
righteous objection and political necessity, the dissolve of courage and
conviction, the encounter of self with mirror, there must have been too
many mismatches, an overdose of delusion and of course the reality of
encountering forces beyond one’s strength to overcome or resist.
These songs were powerful. Tender. I am not sure if we really
caressed their substance. Time passes. Those who were young grow old.
Some become cynical, some remain fresh. We all realize that things
change. Slowly. We cannot force those who come afterwards to learn from
our errors. We can only hope.
I think every individual has to figure out what’s best for him/her
and needs to locate him/herself in a larger collective and inquire into
and understand the dimensions of that larger entity within him/herself.
I can speak for myself, that’s all. Right now, I am thinking of
literature. People. Collectives. Two songs play in my heart: Sabanda api
kandu novemu and Wahinnata hekinam. I return again to something I wrote
six years ago.
I am convinced that the revolution begins with poetry and that it
ends with the abandonment of love. I say, therefore, ‘let there be rain,
a soft drizzle; let it fall on barren, drought-ridden territories and
let it be me.’
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