Someday, today will be nostalgia

Bob Dylan sang ‘the answer my friend, is blowing in the wind.’ But when it comes to suicide, it only leaves behind a bunch of unanswered questions. Once upon a time, cable TV was our only source of entertainment and the only sources of new music were Channel V and MTV. At the turn of the decade, there used to be a show called the Billboard top 100 which was hosted by a very pretty VJ called Asha. It aired every Saturday at 8 pm and for the longest time, it was the only peek we got into the latest in pop, rock and hip-hop. The year was 2001. One day, a song broke its way into the top 100. It featured 5 guys who looked like they were high on many things and angry with everything, venting all their anguish out in a video where there were in some sort of a tunnel. It was dark and angry, but it was different. The song was One Step Closer and that was my introduction to Linkin park.  The same album spawned a few other hits like Crawling, Papercut and In the end . Th...

Pearl Jam's haunting ballad Gone is about someone seeking to escape the rigors and limits of small town life and chart a new course. While performing the song on VH1 Storytellers, Eddie Vedder quotes another song inspired by small towns, the late Lou Reed's Small Town in which he sings ' the only good thing about a small town is you know you want to get out.'  Outside the cocoon of 24x7 wi-fi and artificially cooled air, is a world. It may lack many of the things that cities spoil us for choice with and numb our senses to, but it is definitely more real than the Truman Show lives of sameness that we lead. There are two ways to explore a small town. One is to hire an AC cab, zip through landscapes and people, finish whatever you went for and return. The other is to ditch the comforts and travel in their buses, walk on their roads, drink chai in their chai kadas and listen to their stories, hopes and dreams. We traveled to a place called Gandikotta in Andhra Prad...