There are some things in life which
you never get along with. It’s not that you can’t change it if you put your ass
behind it, there seem to be some kind of unwritten law which states such and
such are never meant to be. The topic I am referring here is my relationship
with musical instruments. To say that it has been a bumpy ride would be quite
an understatement. My laziness, crappy teachers… whatever may the reason be, we
just didn’t click.
My
first tryst with this ‘untamable partner’ happened a few years back. The child
in me believed that not knowing to play even a single instrument was pitiable
and I decided to do something about this. Thus I joined the nearest music
academy to learn Organ. The choice of instrument was a random one for any
instrument would have sufficed. Classes started and I kept aside a few hours of
my precious Sundays for this purpose. Slowly I fought through the ‘A’s, the
‘E’s and the ‘G’s and reached the (drums roll) ‘Twinkle-Twinkle-Little-Star’
stage. As my teacher deemed it very important I fervently mastered it. For the
next few classes all I was allowed to do was to play this over and over. I was
starting to get a bit annoyed by this. But then I happened to watch the movie
’The Karate Kid’. There is a scene in this film in which Jackie Chan
makes Jaden Smith pick up a jacket from the floor, hang it on the
wall and throw it back down repeatedly for hundreds of times. And through this
simple action he taught the kid karate. Watching this I had a moment of
clarity, if you will. And in that moment I realised that
Twinkle-Twinkle-Little-Star was my ‘jacket’ and the reason why I was made to
play it over and over was because the day my teacher tells me to stop, I would
be something close to a local Mozart. With this in mind I tried even hard at
mastering the rhyme. But the recognition day remained elusive and eventually I
called it quits. I think it would be apt to say that the only thing that
improved during those classes were the high scores in the mobile game my
teacher used to play.
We
refrained from contact for the next few years until my recent semester break.
This time I decided to try my hand at guitar. Unlike the first time, this
instrument was chosen because of a few reasons. The major one being the fact
that I was really captivated watching Antonio Banderas in Desperado
and I decided that I should at least learn to play guitar (I would have liked a
guitar box full of guns like those in the movie a lot better…but that ain’t
happening). My decision was also backed by the fact that Guitar is one of the
major brownie point winners out there. So I rang up a couple of my friends who
had an awful amount of time to kill, who thought along the same lines as me and
joined to learn guitar. The first week went really well. We attended all the
classes and put up an effort at learning it. There were even days in which our
fingertips became red and bloody due to strumming the guitar for very long
stretches. It was around the time we all got to the B string that our attention
began to falter. Our days became filled with trips to not so known yet
picturesque locations and waterfalls in our locality, watching old movies,
sleeping and some other things which can’t be mentioned here. Long story short,
I haven’t set a foot there since then. And hence my second encounter with
musical instruments too came to a premature ending albeit through my own fault.
Even though my first two
outings with musical instruments did not bear any fruit, I am not opposed to
the idea of having another go at it. It is because I still believe that not
knowing to play even a single musical instrument is a sad affair. And I will
continue to try to change that. Violin is looking really cool for now. Maybe
I’ll try to learn that or I’ll continue with guitar or organ. Whether I will
master it or not is another question altogether.