Changing Tunes Of Time.

By Anand Menda

Just the other day, during our family drive to a restaurant for dinner, I noticed something which gave me some food for thought.

Whenever we go out on a family drive, we normally play the music which everyone likes or probably switch on the radio and keep changing the station to find something interesting. Again within no time, we tend to change it to some other station for we no more want to listen or shall I say hear that song. We put on some mash ups from music app in which one song is sung mixed up with another and so on. That makes me wonder where we are headed. We don't have the patience to hear through a song till the end, leave alone listen to it and enjoy the rhythm or the lyrics.

I still remember those days when we were kids. We were fortunate to have graduated from old gramaphones to the cassette players. We didn't have to carry bulky gramaphones in order to listen to music. We could easily take a device called walkman which would fit into our pockets and do that.

Music was something we felt in those days. We didn't have the best audio quality, but the quality of music was exemplary. That's one of the reasons why we still hum along the old songs so effortlessly even now. I have no intention to degrade the present generation of singers or musicians, but it is a fact that digitalization has made compusing music an easier job. There are the pre-recorded sounds from which we can choose. Gone are those days when the musicians and composers had to create the sound manually. For that matter even the singers had no option of modulating and cutting the errors. Things have changed for the good no doubt, but haven't we become too synthetic or artificial?

Even as listeners, we have changed a lot. We no longer appreciate the composition for what it's worth. We have, if I may say lost the sense of listening to music. I guess it has more to do with the way we live our lives. In the hussle bussle of our professional as well as personal lives, we have lost the sense of living. Earn to live has been replaced with Live to Earn and that has hijacked our sense for compassion for life.

By Anand Menda