Music for the feet

Technology has come to the rescue of the bus operators. Many decades ago such entertainment was provided by the ‘Kavi Kola’ reciters, and the visually handicapped or differently abled singers. The poetry tracts died a natural death for reasons not known and today such gossiping has been taken over by all the electronic media

“Music is sometimes aimed at the feet of the audience.” This was a comment I had heard over the radio, by a critic trying to describe some of the modern day Sinhala music. It is not a new concept, all over the world there has been music and song meant to make the audience move their feet and their bodies to its rhythm. These thoughts came to my mind as I listened to and watched the video on the flat screen in the bus on route 17, from Kandy to Bataramulla.

It was probably meant to entertain the passengers, who had to wait for nearly one hour for the bus to leave Kandy. Technology has come to the rescue of the bus operators. Many decades ago such entertainment was provided by the ‘Kavi Kola’ reciters, and the visually handicapped or differently abled singers. The poetry tracts died a natural death for reasons not known and today such gossiping has been taken over by all the electronic media.

The beggars have been banned from the buses, leaving an open field for the vendors of fruits, food items and drinks. And the lottery ticket sellers offering a chance to win millions.

In between the shouting by the vendors, on the screen, young people were wriggling and twisting endlessly to ‘non-stop’ music. When the audience wants to dance to any music the musicians can play any tune and the vocalists can sing any song, even a religious or tragic one, but the crowd will continue to dance. In the bus, cramped into narrow seats, we can only move our fingers, even if we listen.

Anyway there is always some good thing in every situation and it helped me to write this. Mahagama Sekara used to write on the back of empty cigarette packs. As a slave of digital technology I could write only on my telephone. Drowned in this noise which goes for music there is no way to escape it except by shutting our minds to it. Writing this seem to be easier than reading a book.

The ground where the audience had collected was already muddy like a cow shed which did not seem to deter the young girls and boys who were ‘dancing’. They were simply shaking their hands and bodies trampling the mud. Their movements had no rhythm and no timing with the music. It was of no concern to the music makers on the stage.

They were dancing to the songs of Nanda Malini sung by male vocalists, sung in the same voices as they sang Jothipala or Punsiri Zoysa. I wondered who these young people were. It is not possible to say if there were adults and families with young children among the audience, because the camera was aimed at the young dancers only.

Did the audience really enjoy the music or was it just an excuse for them to come out of their dingy boarding houses and spend the whole night in the open with total freedom. If the girls were slaving away in the glorified tailoring shops masquerading as garment factories, then they had a reason.

It was an opportunity to get out of the monotony just for a few hours and also out of the supervision of their parents and elders. It was an opportunity to mix with the young men with no chaperones around, to let their hair down in more ways than one. The young people were really enjoying it. Much more than would an aristocratic crowd who would pay several thousand rupees to sit in airconditioned comfort and listen to the same songs. Music and song is universal. It does not know any barriers, wealth, power, intelligence or caste, creed and race. On this video I can hear English Tamil and Hindi songs.

They all provide the same entertainment, the same joy and relief. That is what music is for, and what it has always been, from the time man began to reproduce the natural music around him. The only difference perhaps is that man has moved so far away from nature to make every thing artificial, synthetic and very poor imitations of the natural music. Yet it is of no concern either for the fans.

Many have written about the noise pollution in these buses but the regular travelers have got so used to it they sleep through the journey, like the dog in the smithy.

This reminded me also of the Washington Post experiment of a musician playing at a metro station in Washington D.C. for 45 minutes, during rush hour when at least a thousand people would pass by. Only 6 people had stopped for a while to listen, some had dropped a few coins. Children who wanted to stop were dragged away by their parents. When he stopped playing no one noticed.

This was one of the best musicians in the world, Joshua Bell, playing six Bach pieces, on a violin worth 3.5 million dollars. The conclusion had been “if we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever written, how many other things are we missing?”

How many other things are we missing, everyday in our mad rush from one place to another or from one task to another, with all our senses shutting out everything around us? We do not see the misery, inequality and the cruelty around us, nor do we see the beauty around us.

It is time for us to pause, even for a brief minute, to look around us, to listen, feel and think.

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