Musical Musings ...

Can you imagine what happens when a boy from a small town from the north-east nook of India makes it to the final round of a National Level Singing Competition, that is aired to millions of television viewers across the country, and the winner is decided by popular audience votes? In the state that the boy is from, my state, absolute mayhem.

I was amazed to see it. As I wended my way from the airport to my home, suddenly I noticed the first of the lot – a massive hoarding that said – Vote for Debojit. For a split second, I was puzzled. The elections hadn’t yet been announced. And the last time I heard, the old goats that starred in the Assam Election Circus went by names like Tarun Gogoi, Prafulla Mahanta and Co. Then I saw the face, remembered it from TV – Sa Re Ga Ma Pa was the show, with Shaan as the anchor. And then they almost exploded onto my ignorant face – all along the 20-odd kilometers from the airport to home, via my dad’s office – posters, hoardings, banners, flyers, any kind of advertising material.

You had to see it to believe it. One day I saw one procession saying ‘Tarun Gogoi Down Down’ (Tarun Gogoi, by the way, is our gentlemanly but incompetent Chief Minister) and then, another procession, with numbers bigger than the one in the Tarun Gogoi do, that had banners that read ‘Vote for Debojit’, ‘You Are Our Pride Debojit’, and anything else you can think of in that general direction.

All of Assam rooted for him. The powerful All Assam Students Union (AASU) supported him. The local populace rooted for him. I met people who claimed to have sent 150 SMSs a day to Sa Re Ga Ma to ensure that Debojit won. There was camaraderie where earlier there was contempt, distrust, enmity. Amazing things happened.

When the AASU called a bandh to protest against the Kakopathar incident (I’ll just say it was another in a long line of atrocities the army has been perpetrating in this wonderful state that’s my home, in the name of curbing ‘insurgency’), for the first time ever, Barak Valley too observed the bandh. When a famous folk singer lay seriously ill in Lower Assam, and there was a need for funds for his treatment, money came from the Barak Valley. Even if it was for a fleeting moment, the phenomenon that Assam made of Debojit enabled bridging of abysmal chasms, healed age-old wounds.

To me, being practically an outsider to this kind of sentiment, having spent a majority of my life outside Assam, the whole thing seemed like we were doing what we do best – getting into a mad frenzy of emotion. But slowly, over a period of of time, the cynic/skeptic in me gave way to the analyst.

Then it struck me. We are a people so starved of a homegrown hero, in any field – our megastar movie hero of one time only managed to land bit roles (drunk, wife beater lower middle class man, etc.) in a few B-grade Hindi movies; our modern Assamese music superstar singer’s claim to national level (Bollywood) fame was, apparently, singing the higher notes of the theme song of Sanjay Gupta’s Kaante, our musical legend managed to make it to the national stage by resinging in Hindi songs he had written ages ago in Assamese, for his friend’s movie – that this seemed like the one opportunity of an entire collective population’s lifetime to make a hero out of one of us.

It didn’t help that the mentor of the boy’s competitor made some apparently derogatory remarks about him. In fact, it just sparked the collective indignation of all of Assam. So what if when initially asked where he was from, the aspiring singer said Cachar, and not Assam. So what if he was not actually Assamese, but a Bengali. So what if the AASU, one of the powerful organizations in the state, and even ULFA-declared bandhs had little or no impact in the Barak Valley, where Cachar is. This was our one chance at glory, and we were going to make it count.

And win he did. And the state went berserk. I doubt even Kapil’s Devils, the Indian cricket team that conquered all in the 1983 World Cup, had got such a rousing reception on their return.

Now Debojit is back. He has won a flat in Mumbai, as well as a recording contract, which is surely good news for him and his family. As for the rest of us mere mortals that made a champion out of a mere human being, its business as usual. We are still screaming our heads off at traffic jams, the armed police are still subjecting bikers to random checks, the army is still conducting its ‘operations’, the car wallahs are still slapping the hell out of the rickshawallahs, thelawallahs, and other assorted people that make the lower class of Assamese society, the housewives are still gossiping, the government machinery is still putting the turtle to shame with its speed of delivery, corruption is still the quickest way to make a buck here…but Barak Valley and Brahmaputra Valley are in an uneasy but welcome embrace. For now.