Anirudh Asher's Blog

Ladies and Gentlemen!

I think I am getting back into the groove. It takes a certain amount of jolly good humour and persistence to be able to live through a writer’s block, and I am not even referring to the place where I live. Life has been tossing and turning since a while now, I entered into a beautiful relationship with a gorgeous girl, a camera and lots of hard hitting lessons about life. Well the life lessons keep coming, but really you don’t realise it till you’re either at the very top or the very bottom. All in all, voila! I am alive and kicking and now typing too!

The sense behind the title: I just filled petrol into my car and am currently listening to the Latino Jazz channel on iTunes. The lemon is there purely to amuse.

Latino Jazz is definitely that secret  something that keeps those Spaniards and Mexicans chilled out as they sip on margheritas and take siestas under their massive house sized sombreros. A lifestyle definitely worth trying out atleast for a couple of hours everyday.

What have I been upto?

www.newshit.com.au

Pronounced: dubalioo-dubalioo-dubalioo-dot-nioose-hit-dot-kaum-dot-aye-yoo

This is not a spam bot, its just me. I have been busy not with writing but with helping out the progress of this one student run website.

I feel sleepy now so will be off to bed, all that talk of siesta caught up to me! Ciao then!

I thought of this post as I slept, actually I was half awake but who really knows the difference any more.

Now that your ears and eyes are probably bleeding from the tributes being doled out to unsuspecting media victims as yourselves, its finally my turn to give you something to rip your hair out over.

My own personal tribute to the late king of Pop!

As a three year old, I never really knew who Michael Jackson was, and like most other three year olds, I didn’t really give a diaper’s change. The only real opportunity(and reason) when I learned the name of the famous crooner, was that the two family tortoises (approx 30 years old each at the time) were named after him. One was Michael the other Jackson.

Slowly as time progressed, the musical bug in my DNA bit. On family drives down to Vasai and back the only tunes that ever played in the car were Hotel California and Thriller. My Dad was always at the wheel, Mum was on the air keyboard, big brother took the air guitar and I took the air bongos. We switched instruments sometimes and sometimes we all played the air guitar but there was plenty of space in the sedan and as long as The Eagles rocked on, and Dad didn’t hand any of us the wheel.

Oh but this tribute is about Michael Jackson? Oh right. Slowly and surely as my brother picked out his favourite shiny  discs from Mum and Dad’s meticulously imported CD collection, and started losing them, I had grown to love the masterpieces that were Pink Floyd, Harry Belafonte, Julio Iglesias, Eric Clapton, Phil Collins, Santana, Def Leppard, Queen and without doubt Michael Jackson(All before he managed to lose the last one- Santana).

By the time I was eight years old, I was already addicted to Mum’s Sony Walkman, the pinnacle of space research at the time. I did attempt to figure out how those things worked and even managed to destroy an imported Sony portable Hi-fi, for which I survived without getting an earful thanks to my Dad’s love for his four year old. The only casette I really bothered listening to was Michael Jackson’s album with “They Don’t really care about us”. My first power track.

Electro House or even any kind of house music did not exist back in those days, but I knew power music when I heard it. This was IT. I felt like Michael Jackson was God, and I was going to gain Nirvana from listening to his music, which was all fine till I got bored and moved on to heavier stuff from Dad’s classic rock collection.

I know that this tribute is not really too much about Michael Jackson, but hey, I’ve written it and I know you’re enjoying this short memoir so read on.

Soon enough I was 12 and the big MJ was going to perform for the very first and last time in Mumbai. I wanted to go, but tickets were way too expensive and after I’d seen our dear PM of the time Atal Bihari Vajpayee sit in the front row with what looked like industrial ear protectors in the newspapers, I deduced that the show was also too loud for a ten year old.

Soon enough there were rumours that Michael Jackson was a child molester, and thankfully the Indian media was not as bumbling and irrelevant as it is today, infact it was barely existent. That was the day that my respect for the strange artist Michael Jackson who had a dark complexion before and was now fair, who sang of equality, love, peace and most of all zombies was dead for me as an idol. Music lives on, just like I didn’t really care that Freddy Mercury was gay and had died from aids before I knew who he was, or that Def Leppard’s drummer had lost his left arm in a car crash, whether Curt Cobain died from an overdose of happiness or drugs, their music was loved and goosepimpled till I was ready to move on to the next big track.

Your creation will always take over it’s own identity, and once you are famous it won’t matter if you change underwears, names, address, religions, undergo plastic surgery, or adopt African babies to serve as future legal slaves. Once you are a public figure you’re at the public’s mercy till the whole generation forgets you. And then you die.

©Anirudh Asher, 2009.

Note: For those who were touched by (the death of) their uncle Michael Jackson, please note that this is my memoir of the Late king of Pop, when it’s time to write a tribute to the late king of Poppy, I’ll consult you. Again take with as many shots of tequila as necessary if you are still unhappy about my style of writing… Sheesh, I should rename my blog, “With a Shot of tequila©”!