Let the Music Play

Good to hear that the police and military bands are back at parks and public places across the city.

Somewhere in our huge race to get ahead, we seem to have forgotten about the simple pleasures of life.

Yuck, how goody-goody and utterly rubbishy that sentence sounds. Still, it was fun in the olden days, when you went for a horsy ride at Cooperage on a Sunday evening and the police band was playing some mix of rousing marches and standards.

It added that touch of something or the other and makes a change from today where you depend on the music systems of auto rickshaws for entertainment or have to wait for one more interminably noisy loud-speaker blaring Indian festival.

Anyway, when you fell down from the horsy and screamed your guts out, no one was disturbed since the band dominated all other sounds in the park, even the balloon sellers and candy floss wallas and all those other vendors of valuable trumpery.

This ensured happiness for everyone else at the park as sometimes there is no more annoying sound than screaming children. I’m not going to blather about how today’s children don’t go to parks.

Frankly, why should they? Look at how rundown most of them are. Where do the children play, sang
the man a long time ago.

The answer is: at home, because there’s nowhere else that’s not a road, a shopping mall or an office block.

For years and years, the Navy Band did shows for the public at Gateway of India and a grand performance in some hall as well - it was a big brass band which came out with really stirring stuff.

Of course, nostalgia demands that we stick to the songs of yore and not keep up with the times and some bands have regretted that everyone today only wants Bollywood.

Well, why not? Even Bollywood music played live in a park will be great fun and if the police are busy making music, they will have less time to harass couples inspired by the music to make something else.

Can music save our moral soul, the other man once sang.

We’re about to go into that horrible October heat, but that’ll pass in a month or two so its the time to make the best of Mumbai’s weather and head outdoors. C’mon, strike up the band!