#NowPlaying

Long ago, when not all music was a joke in India, I came across a community on Orkut. It was run by a set of weirdos who never ever met each other but shared music with each other and would go to great pains to ensure everyone who wanted music got it. Hindustani classical and Carnatic were the subjects. The idea was not to promote piracy. About 1000 people were sharing oddball recordings (mostly private recordings), and nobody knew what the rest of the people looked like. No meet-ups celebrating ‘introverts’ meetings and talking.

When I joined Twitter, I came across so many kind souls who would share music with me and in turn, I would forward that music (actual files, not links) to the people on the list. The list. The inspiration was from the Orkut group. When I counted, we shared about 1750 songs by 2017. I stopped the list in 2017 for reasons that merit no mention here. Since 2017, I have had a music-sized hole in my heart because most of the music I come across is s h i t e.

#NowPlaying was the hashtag we would bond around. The hashtag is born again now, albeit on the list, after 7 long years, and my world, music, is back!

Still. no. meetups, though. Thankfully.

One of the songs that someone sent made me want to ask strangers to listen to it. Here is the song with a bit of text from the email.

I'm sharing an Assamese song by a young talent named Bishrut Saikia.

The song is called Daag. It's a tribute to his mother, who was regularly abused by his violent alcoholic father, who later left him and her mother without any support. The society blamed the mother and her character for the fallout instead of calling out the abusive husband.

The song is a two-fold request by Bishrut:

The first request is to the society to show kindness to his mother and not to do a character assassination without knowing the truth.

The other request is for his mother to stay strong and not embrace the path of suicide despite the character assassination by society.

Music. forever and beyond.