Column

Anyway, Mumbai’s all dead and gone says a friend. Others say it has moved across the border to India (you know, Navi Mumbai and all that stuff). Other friends just hop across the border to their weekend homes along the Raigad coast and get back to the city after communing with nature while they meet the same people on the weekend whom they meet in the city during the week.

This gives you three kinds of people: The ones who know the past was better, the ones who never lived in the same past as the first lot (they always lived across the border) and the others who have managed to get the best of both worlds.

But the past still never lets you rest. At a restaurant the other night, the crowd was aged between 35 and 90 (barring two men in their 20s) and it was being entertained by two very young girls singing very old songs. Like Una Paloma Blanca, Crocodile Rock, On Top of the World (eeks, The Carpenters) and even George McCrae’s Rock Your Baby, which was a big hit in 1974. Everyone from the 35-year-olds to the 90somethings sang along.

The poor singers were very brave and after being forced to reach back into the past with Englebert and assorted songs you never want to hear again, struck back with Shakira. To which only the two boys in their 20s responded.

I have been forced, over the past year or so, to listen to horrible golden oldies like Autumn Leaves, Besamo mucho and other stuff, which I last heard when I was 13 and pretty much thought I would never have to listen to again in eateries all over Mumbai. Now more than 30 years later, they come back to bite me.

Advancing deafness shall be my only salvation.

But it’s a disease. When a cellphone service provider threw a sale of cheap CDs (don’t ask me why), almost everyone I knew bought all the vintage stuff. As a result, I now have more CDs of Carole King songs than Carole King knew she sang. The others bought Bob Dylan, in every single avatar. Maybe they will never listen to him (how can they?) but they knew that they could never buy Shakira. My lips don’t lie. When I left the exhibition, all the Pink Floyd was sold out and some six million West Life CDs were unsold.

So, parts of Mumbai are definitely moving back into the past. I think this is a sign of senility. Because I distinctly remember in my childhood, you went to places for dinner which had a string quartet playing Tea for Two.

Probably Autumn Leaves as well, which I thankfully don’t remember. I also feel that all this nostalgia for ancient pop music is a drastic reaction against Bollywood. People want something else and are reaching back to the familiar, since everything else familiar is vanishing around them. Ha ha, sheer poetry that thought.

Pick of the week
Still, no matter how many stars it gets from all the film reviewers, I will not watch Rock On!. Years of watching Hindi cinema and listening to rock music have made it clear to me that these are mutually incompatible occupations. And to make a film about ageing rockers in Mumbai who are 30 is a bit of a stretch of my pitifully small imagination. Shouldn’t they be a bit older — like Nandu Bhende and Bashir Sheikh and all their variations of savage and atomic forests in the 1960s and ‘70s?

Or younger, like those Rock Machiners of the late 1980s? And this clean Bollywood version of no drugs no sex rock? Naah, I’m too old for enforced travesties. I can choose my own. On top of the world with autumn leaves, this side of the border.
b_ranjona@dnaindia.net