Watching fresh high school graduates from small towns taking their first giant leap into a large city reminded me of my own big step 12 years ago…

Small town white boys

The fall 2009 term at the University is set to begin next week and the campus is already buzzing with 17-19 year old’s who, after recently finishing high school, are ready to begin their undergraduate studies at the University. September is usually a strange month – young students walk around the campus with their eyes wide open, scanning everything in sight, almost looking delirious, lost, and definitely looking overwhelmed. Many of these students have never been in such a place before: the caring and confined environment of their neighborhood high school is a past. There are fifty-thousand other students at the university now, all unfamiliar, diverse, and nobody will hold you in their arms if you start crying.

Among the different kinds of students starting university, I find that the most fascinating ones are the students coming from small Ontarian towns scattered around Toronto. They come to the big city from a pretty homogeneous society that’s predominantly Caucasian and Christian (I am still learning the denominations – Catholic, Protestant, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Anglican, etc. so pardon me for painting everything in one brush). Their towns are small, everyone-knows-everyone type, sparsely populated, relaxed and have similar kind of food. Toronto on the other hand is a big city, extremely multicultural, mixed, noisy, crowded, pretty ruthless and fast paced.

Consequently, these small town students are bewildered and you can easily sense some strange mix of panic and excitement on their faces. Often parents will accompany them as they go around various offices for registration, and the kids will marvel at the number of food options they have, while struggling to understand people’s accents and double checking if what they are seeing is real.

Wait. That sounds familiar!

Let me exaggerate my story a bit. I grew up in a little suburb north of Mumbai, and until the age of 16 I was pretty much a local boy, going to primary school (grades 1-7) and secondary school (grades 8-10) close to my home. Most people were middle class Hindus, spoke Marathi and were vegetarians, and those awful things they show in movies were seldom heard of. Once in a while my parents or my school took us to Mumbai, to “see the big city”, and I thought - ‘wow… how busy, how crowded, and look at that building… it has a lift (elevator)! and 10 floors!… oh god… I can never live here…’

For grade 11 & 12, I went to, what we call, a Junior College that was in the city – a 90 minute commute. I was thrilled, shocked and confused. There were people from five religions, speaking ten different languages, eating god knows what kind of food and speaking in strange accents that took a while to understand. At times I wondered if I could really take all that change.

So now, whenever I talk to these fresh puppies from small towns (and I have to deal with a lot of them), it reminds me of my own time back when I took the leap out of the shell. It’s interesting how remarkable and essentially similar our stories are.

There is a Marathi saying that comes to my mind: “घरोघरी मातीच्या चूली”¹ which roughly means: “Things work the same way, regardless where you go.” Indeed.

¶ Blogged by Priyank Thatte

Yesterday I got take-out Sushi dinner with two friends, who I will, for the sake of simplicity and to illustrate the fact that it was a diverse group, simply call white guy and black guy, at the Nathan Phillips square outside Toronto city hall. As we walked into the square looking for a empty, quiet spot to rest our asses and I heard some music that sounded familiar, coming from a stage marked with a banner saying “Himalayan festival 2009″ (or something of that essence), two things were pretty clear – our dinner spot was going to be neither empty nor quiet. After spending half a minute trying to guess if “Himalaya” meant India, Nepal, Bhutan, or Tibet, by process of elimination I concluded that it was afterall a Nepali festival.

We took a quick look around what was going on. Apart from traditional Nepalese foods like popcorn, coca cola and nachos, they had a stage with dance performances and a small but quite enthusiastic crowd of supporters cheering for everything that was being conducted. It was very nice to see so many of ‘my people’ (apparently) enjoying a little ‘by the Nepalese, for the Nepalese’ festival in the very heart of the city while there were two other large festivals, Chinese and Caribbean, going on few blocks away (Summer Sundays are busy man!). The music was blaring, and it was what I call, for the lack of a better term, ‘second grade bollywood music’.

15 minutes passed. Unable to bear it, I was getting increasingly uncomfortable, but the seemingly tranquil facial expressions on my friends made me wonder if I was the only one who was getting bothered and others were actually enjoying this ‘exotic’ music. Finally I asked each of them, “Do you like this music?” Almost apologetically, they said, “Not at all!” and added that they thought that I was probably liking it. I wish.

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I had an image of Nepal as a virgin, exotic (even for Indians, Nepal is exotic) country, unharmed by foreign cultural influences. Technically, each state of India is a little country in itself (more diverse and distinct than the little European countries), and Nepal could easily have been just one of those states. Fortunately or unfortunately, Nepal is a separate country, and that, I fancied, would be a sufficient reason for Nepal to maintain its indigenous cultural identity that includes its Himalayan music.

When I think of Nepali music, what comes to my mind is not what I get to hear today. I have listened to lot of Nepali music over the last few months, and sadly I am forced to conclude that today’s Nepali music has lost the Nepal-ness in it. It’s just second grade Bolywood garbage bundled with Nepali lyrics. Now what exactly is second grade Bollywood music? you might ask. Well, Bollywood (the Hindi film industry based in Mumbai hitherto called Bombay) movies, as you might know, are roughly equivalent to what is referred to as ‘musicals’ in the west. Each movie has anywhere between four to ten songs of four to five minutes each. About 800-1000 Hindi movies are made each year, and probably an equal number of movies are churned out from different states in their own language. As a result, every year there are tens of thousands of movie songs in the market. Then there is also the music from independent musicians. Quality and quantity are almost always inversely related, and as a manifestation of this rule, a very very large chunk of commercial music produced in India is of very low quality – repetitive beats and limited variation in notes. Hardly any songs have shelf lives longer than few days, since alternatives are cheap, plenty and easily available. Ask yourself (if you are Indian) or an Indian friend how many songs you/they remember from the latest movie you/they watched. The answer will be surprisingly low since most of these songs have null significance in the movie plot. I am not painting Bollywood music in one stroke at all, there is extremely good stuff but very rare.

Traditional Nepali music (for example Newari, Gurung, etc.) has virtually lost its influence on contemporary mass-produced music, just as the impact of Indian classical music on Hindi film music is more or less a history. What I mean to elucidate is that contemporary Nepali music has unfortunately been overwhelmed by second grade bollywood music – a silent take over (or adaptation if you prefer to call it that) and I am upset with this kind of evolution.

I leave you with an awful Nepali song which could easily pass as just another Hindi movie song if the language is changed (spare yourself from watching the video). Sorry Nepal, ‘our’ Bollywood, a monster factory churning out conformist music, is uncontrolled and will kill regional traditions.

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I suspect this post will force the proponents of Bollywodization into a defensive stance, nevertheless I am curious to hear criticisms and opinions.

¶ Blogged by Priyank Thatte