A Day To Remember

I was in my 11^th grade when I was called to perform together with my school orchestra for the World Diabetics Day at the Petroleum Development Oman (PDO) campus, a brilliant place near the beach side. I thought this was going to be an amazing opportunity for me to perform outside school and so I joined with a lot of enthusiasm. Well, only after I reached there did we realize that it was more of a DJ party arena than a place to play few Indian classical pieces. I was shocked seeing the kind of crowd that dint look too happy when the DJ was turned off for our performance. Worst of all, there were no microphones. Apparently they had thought that Indian instruments could make really loud sounds which wouldn’t need amplifiers (since in Oman bagpipes are used extensively which need no amplifiers). We began playing. I couldn’t hear what the keys were playing, nor could the tablaist sync his beat with the chorus. The mandolin and the sitar were trying hard to catch up to the rhythm and the entire thing, at least to me, was like a cacophony of blabbering cows.  But I did notice a Korean Couple who could catch the beat and rhythm in our seemingly bizarre music and they looked like they enjoyed it. After the program, they came up to me to tell me that they really enjoyed the music and that they had not seen most of these instruments ever before. And for the next couple of minutes my friends and I were busy explaining to them about each of the instruments that we had and they listened with keen interest.

However, I returned home late that night with a bottle of ice cold pepsi and a Big Mac from McDonalds and collapsed in my room and thought about my day. I realized that there were two kinds of people in this world of music. The first group is an adamant one, who would not budge for whatever novel matter is prevalent around them. They do not appreciate or respect other cultures and their music along with it. The second group consists of people who are always willing to acquire as much knowledge as they can about anything and everything about music and musical instruments and they are always blessed to enjoy every bit of music around them, even if it meant the ‘cacophony of blabbering cows’.