Songs in Context

 Buried beneath the pile of hardbound books in the under-bed storage is a singular 8-GB SanDisk Pendrive. Around 6 mp3 files of miserable sound quality, grainy, and interspersed with shouts of enthusiastic children pushing each other on a swing. The folder had an interesting name- "Songs from the Red Town", last modified a couple of years ago.

Just the other day, I was telling my friend that it was impossible to 'miss' a song, you could only miss the context that you heard it in. 

"Life is not made up of contexts or whatever academic jargon you have crammed up inside your brain".

Justifiably reproachful.

But what about songs that rose out of contexts- of Red Towns drowned in the yellow haze of neon lamp posts, of windy evenings by the Strand road and a white, ornate porch overlooking the mighty Hoogly on a weary afternoon? 'Songs from the Red Town' was conjured up at a 'ghat' in Serampore over cups of tea in cylindrical earthen cups. In a town away from the 'red' one that we called 'home'. What finally went into the pendrive- a peculiar medley of ghazals, country music and cranky guitar solos- could only be described as the potential development of a string of contexts. Contexts that were carefully archived and stored away, and only brought up two years later when Serampore's empty river-facing streets welcomed us back on the eve of a Kalboishakhi.

Only the desolately empty nights in your house at Birbhum- where you could only have tea with milk from cartons or sachets while leafing through over 40 open tabs for an assignment- could lead to a song like 'Jailbirds'. The changing landscapes in your brain- from Debord, Baudrillard and Raiford to the paved walkways of a charming 'french' town by the Ganges could be metamorphosed into chord progressions and uploaded as free tracks on SoundCloud. For the past few months, I have mapped strategies of resistance, landscapes of migration, patterns of subversion, and yet I have never been succesfull at mapping music beyond sheets and songbooks. Yet once in the while, pieces of the puzzle pop up in the form of discarded pendrives and creative album titles, or even a strangely familiar mango filling in a Danish pastry.

Pastry filling? A context? The gatekeepers of academic jargon are quaking in their graves.