Theloopylululog

If I could relive one year of my life, it would be the year 1996.

It wasn’t the best of years. It wasn’t the worst of years. It was just like every other year of mine until then; opening with a big bang and a target percentage to achieve in the SSC boards. Pretty much everything revolved that planet since.

My work was set for the next year and half. All I had to do was find myself a warm cozy corner and hibernate under the books.

I was 15. There wasn’t anything else I did except bury myself under books anyway.

Naive and innocent to a fault I was like a rose who is oblivious to the thorns it grows amongst. A fool if you might.

Given a choice I would love to go back to being her again.

Why?

What makes 1996 exceptional and one of a kind for me is the music I was exposed to that year. Life hadn’t marked me with bruises yet, so the music I heard and fell in love with coloured my veins and sculpted me into who I would become in the coming years.

Cassette tapes of Michael Jackson, The Eagles, Boney M and Michael Learns To Rock were found lying around near my books. They were as much a part of my syllabus as were the books I carried to school.

Every single day at 3:30PM IST, I would be home with a cup of tea listening to them. Rewind. Repeat. Until the cassette tapes wound themselves too tight, too loose or died midway. I never gave up on the habit.

New cassette tapes were recorded for a rupee or two and I was back to business. Playing them on a loop as I finished my homework and stuffed my nose into my books.

Mathematics is a subject I kept at arms length. Let’s just say we treated each other like step sisters. I probably hated her too! But I was studious and my dream percentage needed me to maintain a good rapport with her.

The music got me through what I couldn’t imagine doing alone. To this day I remember my final exams being a breeze, all thanks to the music that kept me company.

I have a photographic memory. So my mind works well with associations. Every theorem I learnt to prove while Michael was learning to rock, every equation solved to Beat it!, every formula learnt by rote to Hotel California and every geometric diagram drawn to flow with the Rivers of Babylon came by handy when I was finally handed the question paper to solve on the D-day.

Need I say, I solved it with my hands while my heart was in a discotheque of it’s own dancing to the beat of all it’s favorites?

I was clueless to what was heading my way in the future back then.

My mind hadn’t learnt to break me yet. My body hadn’t whipped me into shape. My heart hadn’t bitten or burnt me. Heartbreaks, failures, depression was a decade away. In short, Life hadn’t yet revealed it’s true monstrosity to that young girl with stars for eyes.

So music was just music to me. I heard and lived through it without any encumbrances. I didn’t sympathise or empathise with the lyrics. Rest assured I didn’t even know what was being sung in English most of the time!

I jived because my heart just believed in being happy without really going through the burden of unravelling what happiness meant. My mind found the rhythm calming. And the beat helped me keep score with what I was studying. My memory palace began to build a robust system that responded to the tune of the music and organised itself accordingly.

Decades later when I hear one of those songs, I can still recall a snippet from what I was doing one random evening in the winter of 1996.

Sadly I can’t say the same about my connection with music. Now when I hear the same songs, I understand the lyrics. I am the lyrics many a times! It’s a burden…a weight I carry around just because I grew up!

The sadness from heartbreaking songs rip me apart because I KNOW what that feels like. The emptiness and numbness and discrimination MJ sang about leaves a hole inside me now. The eerie and painful reality of MLTR’s Someday Someway is striking. Every time I hear I can’t tell you why by The Eagles, I relive some of the tragic times of my life all over again.

I wish I didn’t. But I do. The perils of growing up…Who knew?

Emotions have given way to what was once pure music to me. Now I FEEL the lyrics even when I do not want to. But I can’t undo what I know now…what I didn’t as a 15 year old.

Life has scarred this 45 year old and music stopped being just plain music a long time ago.

So yeah…I would really wish to go back to being 15 and relive the year 1996; heading home after a tiring day at school, put on some MJ and just beat the hell off of Life!

Going hee hee with just a cup of tea for company. What bliss!

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