Have you been sitting with your friends lately in a café and suddenly a topic that is not in sync with the popular point of view came up? Were you suggested by your friends to not talk about it? To quieten down? To not “discuss such things in public”?
If this hasn’t been the case, then you are extremely lucky.
For the past few years, I have noticed a growing trend—a trend to avoid political discussions in public, and to suppress non-popular beliefs. This ever increasing trend is leading to a very serious process of a dystopian “natural selection”.
Some time back, I started my journey of publishing music with songs of dissent and political satire. Some people appreciated these, but this also led to a lot of online trolling (as expected). It has been a year since I have been doing this and my YouTube channel has reached more than 30,000 subscribers with a total of more than 1.7 million views.
I was always told that to get paid gigs, you need numbers to show, and these numbers seemed fair enough to attract some performances. However, when I began asking for gigs at cafes, calling people up, sending them my work profile, there was not a single positive response. Some people did not even state a reason, and others went with, “this does not go with the theme of our place”.
The motive of my content is not monetary gains, and I will keep producing music irrespective of that. But the truth remains that everyone has some financial needs to sustain. Most of my performances have been at protests and gatherings for a cause. And every time, I have received an overwhelming response from the crowd.
Asking questions to the power, feeling inspired to make a change, discussing social situations and laughing at political scenarios in the country is not just supposed to be confined to closed spaces where the people listening belong to the same side of the ideological spectrum. The act of only being comfortable with listening to what you already agree with will only stunt our growth as a society and to be honest, it’s also quite boring!
The music scene in Delhi is overcrowded with the same type of performances everywhere. Majority of the cafes that pay musicians to perform for their patrons expect the same kind of songs to be played, and that sample space is quite narrow. The decision makers in these situations are often people far away from art and only concerned with sales. When you are a curator of art, you hold a significant position in society, and they need to realize their responsibility. The half literate nature of their selection decisions is making artists and art suffer.
So, here’s the major problem:
This reluctance of paying someone to perform songs that might disagree with some people’s opinion forces you to think of content that everyone will be comfortable with and ends up suppressing your thoughts—as it might not be able to “connect with the masses”. This would lead to one-dimensional art scene where everyone is just doing covers of the same old songs and playing “old Bollywood classics”.
This is not the end of the struggle. We have to keep trying to further expand our range of art in the city and not just keep experiments in art confined to places like Mandi House.
चीखता-चिल्लाता डर अब हलक़ में जा बैठा है।
इसे बाहर फ़ेंकने की कोशिश में, कल फिर गाऊंगा।