"Mind Prepare" (also see pictures in below post)

This might be a rather rambling post, I admit at the front end. That’s because only little things have been making it on to the net as of late (still difficult to access because they’ve never come to set it up in my room), but my thoughts are far more widespread as I go through this experience.

Another thing I’ll say is that I haven’t really talked about the Classical music or the Sikh religion much – even though the purpose of my research is the intersection of the two.
Fear not. I am absorbing a huge amount of information about both, through many means. I’ve become an avid reader of Sikh and Punjabi history, which, since this area is one of the cradles of civilization and the ‘doormat’ for every army or tribe coming and going from the subcontinent, is quite involved.

On the music side, my iPod is always humming with everything from the latest albums by well-known artists of Gurmat Sangeet (Sikh music) which are actually quite fabulous, to the classic albums of hindustani music, to old Hindi movie tunes and some qawwali to boot. All of this is attempt to ‘get inside’ the sound of the music here. Other than the occasional 80’s song from the US that’s playing in a café, or the sampling of Western pop that my contemporaries here have on their MP3 players (a bizarre blend of Eminem, Akon, and the Backstreet Boys – even though they all have posters of Britney and Madonna, they don’t even know THEIR best work), I never hear Western music.

The big change is hearing people sing out songs as they work, bike, or clean that aren’t familiar at all. I don’t mean just that the song is not familiar, but all the aspects of the song are unfamiliar – the melodic structure, the words, the style of singing. And yet this is the equivalent of the car mechanic mouthing well-worn Johnny Cash songs as he works. Perhaps this doesn’t come across well in my description, but what I’m try to say is that the realization impels me to try and get inside the whole world of music as much as possible – not that it is really possible in a few months.

In any case, somehow I feel a little guilty about replacing all the songs on my iPod with Indian music – like somehow Western Music will be waiting up for me at the kitchen table when I get home with a look that says “why didn’t you call?” Nevertheless, it’s a good experiment, and I think it’s beginning to show effects in my training here. It must be partly sub-conscious, for whereas I can’t possibly absorb all that new music on an intellectual level in a short time, people here have had it programmed into them since birth.

But I will talk about music and Sikhism more in later posts. Lately I’ve had to wrestle with my own feelings about this experience from the inside. In preparation for coming, and in the initial weeks of being here (after I could assess what would be possible), I drew up a list of general things I wanted to accomplish. Among them were to try and become as proficient as I could in knowledge of classical raags and theory, and performance structure common to Sikh kirtan; to learn the rich religious and musical history of this region by reading and traveling around, and to have conversations/interviews with people I meet here on how they identify with this history; to absorb the quotidian life of the major Sikh community in the world, so I could write about how the life of Sikhs in the US does/doesn’t reflect that; to learn enough Punjabi that I could become at least a temporary resident here; and finally, to be a tourist some of the time and see some other historical/exotic parts of India.

This may seem like an ambitious list, and it also may seem to have many holes in it. But it gave me enough that I thought I would be very busy and stimulated all the time. But it hasn’t always worked out that way. As I near the end of my first month in this country, I have to acknowledge to myself that I’ve struggled to bring that list and myself together. Some days I feel quite aimless – that I have a docket of things I think I should do, but I question whether any of them are worthwhile. Or, because of a few logistical frustrations, I end up staying put for a whole day in my neighborhood reading or practicing, and then feel like I’ve wasted a day in another country, doing something I could do at home.

One thing I didn’t anticipate as a big enough factor was simply culture shock (duh!). Put simply: some things aren’t done the same over here. I expected far more ease of public transportation, and that I could be more independent in terms of going places. Not only is public transportation not as extensive as in the US/Portland/Boston, but it’s terribly crowded, impossible to find information about, and generally not suited to a solo foreigner. Furthermore, even if I were to get somewhere like a historical village or gurdwara, getting around in English in the countryside is not as easy as I had thought, and I quickly become uneasy because of the amount of attention a light-skinned Westerner attracts. In short, I’ve come to rely mainly on hosts and acquaintances here to aid me with transportation. Although people have been very generous in this regard, involving someone else is another cultural influence that results in my plans coming out looking significantly different than when I made them.

The other main cultural difference I’m beginning to come to grips with is more subtle and internal. This begins in the place, of course, of learning the patience that being in another country requires. But it goes to the practice of this music, and dealing with my impatience. Not just impatience to be proficient in the music – but a sense that I need to be ‘doing’ more, ‘seeing’ more, or should just blow of the whole project and live in an ashram in the mountains for the rest of the time. Prudently, I’ve resisted these impulses and tried to keep myself to the project and places I intended, because I believe they will be more rewarding ultimately.

The change it takes, though, is something you could call ‘spiritual’, but I’m just as comfortable calling a kind of relaxation technique. Not surprisingly, things tend to stir up my anxiety here, and it’s difficult to process them without any close friends and family (or even native English speakers) around. So I tend to carry them with a tangible external and internal tension. Even silly things like how quickly I’m progressing learning this raag, how can I get to the train station today to buy my ticket, or how many calories did I consume eating that stuffed paratha for breakfast?

What I’ve found is that if I try to practice this music in that state, it simply doesn’t work. My voice sounds tight, without any fluidity, I can’t reach into the higher notes, and my improvising with the notes sounds contrived and discourages me; a self-fulfilling prophecy. However, if I keep at it for long enough, sometimes I forget about that stuff and find that, without noticing it, I started actually ‘playing’ with the music. My teacher Gurbhej calls this “mind prepare” (in his yoda-esque English it is “you must mind prepare”). When I asked him further about this, the metaphor he came up with is that of food (unsurprising in Punjab, now that I’ve sampled most of the delicious specialties).

He says, “When you are hungry, anything tastes sweet. You don’t need roti (bread) and dal, roti all alone will taste sweet. Mind-prepare is to make your heart hungry for music. Thus any raag you feed it will also be [sweet].” As a side note, a food metaphor was also his explanation of why certain raags are assigned to certain times of the day. “In morning you hungry, but you don’t eat ‘dinner’, you eat ‘breakfast.’”

I think I’ll save the religion piece of this for another time. But it’s at least a half-formed musical notion that probably many of you will be able to relate to. It’s honestly something I’d half-forgotten about Western music, especially singing. Because I have the capacity to get through some piece, even if I don’t really feel like it, that sort of detaches it from the original purpose (though we can debate at length about ‘purpose’ of music). Put simply, if you’re not making sounds you enjoy, what’s the point?