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Is the dawn far?



For a considerably long period of my youth I was important enough to draw the attention of too many unwanted people who didn’t like whatever I said or did. One of the too many things they didn’t like was my love for old Malayalam film songs. The well-wishers thought that my love for old songs was a sign of my regressive tendencies or equally unhealthy romanticism. It is true that I was not happy with the ‘present’ that was available to me then. It is also true that there was a pining romantic in me. My well-wishers tried their best to cure me of the perceived disease as they did with everything about me.

   I’m not blaming them, of course. The truth is that even I didn’t like me; how could I expect others to like me? They were not successful, however, in curing me of anything. But I must acknowledge their relentless endeavours that lasted about five years to wean me off a whole continuum of evils that befriended me like original sins.  

   When their good wishes and better actions became an unbearable pain in my posterior, I quit the place and migrated to Delhi where people have neither the time nor the inclination to be universal do-gooders. When the well-wishers and do-gooders vanished from my life, many of my original sins too vanished. One such sin was my love for songs, old or new. I simply stopped listening to music. I don’t know why it happened. The cassettes were dumped in the store box built above the window in one of the rooms in the staff quarters of Sawan Public School where I worked as a teacher. Soon I discarded the cassette player too.

   When the henchmen and the harrying hags of a godman encroached into Sawan a decade and a half after I lost the music in my soul, I found myself becoming a romantic once again. I longed for music, for the countryside, for solitude, for goodness, for whatever the religious people normally find sinful.

   Today I live in a sylvan village in Kerala and I have a few hundred Malayalam movie songs in the pen drive that plays when I’m driving which I do every day. The songs belong to the period from about 1970 to the present. I started my driving this morning with a song from 1971, auto-selected by the player. Like the other songs of my boyhood days in the collection, this too is written by Vayalar and the music composed by Devarajan. You can watch the video clip below, if you wish:


   It is addressed to the prophets. The poet asks them whether the dawn is still far. The song laments the loss of genuine spirituality and morality. Even god stands as a helpless entity on the street strewn with the debris of broken morals and principles. Arjun stands disarmed in the Kurukshetra. Philosophies burn in some nondescript pyres.

   As I listened to it, I wondered why Vayalar wrote those lines in 1971. Aren’t they more relevant today?


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