Season 1, Episode 3 of The Dewarists brought together Indian Ocean and Mohit Chauhan, in “Maaya” and took me back to 2001. Goa. When Silk Route’s Dooba Dooba was still a popular number and I was loaned the Kandisa tape by my hostel neighbour A. After several months, he stole it back from me. (because I wouldn’t return it voluntarily!)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRhTmRPVrYQ
As I watched the video on YouTube, I noticed the silver creeping into Mohit Chauhan’s sideburns. 🙂 I suddenly realised that it had been more than a decade since the yellow car slowly sunk into the water and it’s been 2 years since Asheem Chakravarty died. It made me wonder about succession plans for artists and their bands. Yes, some bands do keep evolving, their members change, but their peaks of popularity is restricted to a timeframe – a generation at best. In some cases, the music they created lives on even after them, though the members themselves may have moved on, within this life or beyond.
But imagine, each member being able to pick out his own successor who is able to recreate the music as well as that extra something that made the band what it was. Imagine The Beatles now with 4 new members doing concerts with a new sound but retaining the DNA that made them great. Quite impossible no? It’ll never be the same.
And that perhaps explains why they’re special. And it’s not just artists, it goes for people who excel across the spectrum. There is no succession plan they can make. They are unique, ‘single piece’. But then so are all of us, one of a kind. The difference is in scale. What they created left a mark on many more lives. They found something at a point in time that only they could have done, in such a way that anyone who experienced it was changed.
We do many things on any given day, and many a time we are also rockstars in someone’s life, even for a brief period. Is that purpose enough for us or will we want further? Will we open ourselves to possibilities and grab the chance when it comes? Will we go beyond that and chase opportunities down? Maybe the way we answer this frames our life journey.
Mann ka panchhi Tan ka pinjaraÂ
Bin maange ki jail
until next time, rock sako to rock lo 😀