By Shashwat Shukla
I was listening to the Beatles
And John set up a beautiful picture
"Strawberry Fields Forever"
As I was floating with him in the mild summer breeze of the Strawberry Field home in Liverpool where he grew up
That's when I realised
Only natives can write songs
Not just songs though
All organic art seems to flow from a sense of observation
Observation long and deep
Of a place etched in memory and visited ever so often
That can come about only through belonging
Accepting and being accepted by the place
It's situations and its inhabitants
From someone who's seen season after season and
Become a furniture of the place
Yes there are Immigrant Songs
But they speak mostly of conquerors
And vanquishers
Who settle and capture and make a place their own
They write of their triumphs as the 'new natives'
With the confidence of those chosen few who write their own stories
And who stories speak about
I do hear songs of the silent movers
Those left with no choice but to leave
To move away from their homes and locales
Settle somewhere unfamiliar
Without ever conquering or being accepted
As neither the inhabitants nor rulers
Just thrown in a place like garbage brought by the ocean from some passing current
But they too sing only of their own homes
From memory
They weave a picture of place
A trinket from times they knew and lived in
Of familiar shores and long alleyways where they know everything and everyone
They write of rhythms and beats from their homeland
We on the other hand
Born in a city with no culture of our own
To a family assembled from places they didn't know
Cast in the middle of a crowd of anonymous hands and feet
We seem incapable of generating anything artistic
We remember no rhythms
All we can hear is screaming and bickering
And hollering for space
Congestion and commotion fill our eardrums
To the point where the only sound that we make is a discordant shriek
We can only appropriate by mimicry
We're not the conquerors or natives
We aren't even the silent movers from their beautiful lands
We're doubly detached
Like a prison rat
We snatch resources from those who themselves live on borrowed time
No music ever comes to us in our daily scurrying motion
There's nothing organic, original, ornate about our lives
Don't fall for it if we look like you
It's a pathetic attempt at quackery
Which will never create a new note or colour or rhythm or phrase
We're the punchline not the setup
In this joke of a new cosmopolis