homecoming_kanyewest.mp3
All my idols, let 'em go All the demons, let 'em know This a mission, not a show This is my eternal soul
Ghar ki murgi daal barabar. The chicken made at home is nothing more than boiled lentils. The grass is always greener on the other side, basically. The Other Side, whose grass we are so desperate to touch, so that we appear in touch.
Everything starts Over There and makes its way here. When I got unrestricted access to a computer with the internet, during the half-ripe adolescent phase of my life, I went crazy. I learnt about English songs. No, did not just listen to them, but learnt about them. Rehearsed the lyrics, wrote them down in my notebook, a habit passed down from my mother, only with the language changed. I spent nights on forums, websites, and in comment sections, learning about the American way of living and fantasising about it. If I listened to these songs, I would be closer to them. I would strain my ears watching a movie on Romedy Now, and try to remember even one lyric so I could google it. Cher. Celine Dion (when I heard about Sunny Leone, I had already become a little hard of hearing, and was appalled for a hot second). Madonna. Wu Tang Clan. A Tribe Called Quest. Eminem. Snoop Dogg. Soulja Boy. Jay Z. So on and so forth.
It was also the perfect time for me to be a teenager. Lana Del Rey. Marina and The Diamonds. Skins UK. Supernatural. Arctic Monkeys. The Strokes. Grunge fashion — stockings, denim shorts, boots, flannel shirts. All of it was accessible to me via the screen, and nothing else. Our house was built upon prioritising survival and sustenance, not cultivating a sense of style and curating an aesthetic. I was an unpaid teenager with no autonomy, so all I could do was doodle in my notebook, put on my wired earphones, and cry to some of the music sometimes. The words got to you, and sometimes the sadness did. The Secret Life of An American Teenager was bland, but it was a respite from The Sad Life of An Indian Teenager. Everything was far off, shinier, and unachievable.
This formula stands true for everything. Computers came from there. Coffee as a necessity. Self Care. Self Love. Therapy Speak. Shein came from there, after being exported from Bangladesh. Then the website got banned in India. But the products kept coming. In landfills. When the influencers were done with their 30-second reels and sold you a new aesthetic to chase after, they sent the packages back, or threw it all out, in the guise of spring cleaning. But the US is not known for its all-encompassing, welcoming spirit. It likes to deport. It joined hands with private ports in India and sent its hand-me-downs back. India. Bangladesh. Pakistan. Aren’t we all the same? Who cares where it all ends up, as long as it is not on the land of the free?
Same for electronics. Candy Wrappers. Flamin’ Hot Cheetos reaches India either via NRI relatives or containers that end up in our landfills. If you are a little off beat, it might have reached you via Clairo.
Everything reaches here a little too late, a little too damaged. When the Whole World is done with Something, they send it back home, how our mothers would give our clothes to our cousins and neighbours back in the village. They would accept it gladly, clothes from the sheher, the city. It would be new to them, it would be shiny to them still, but for us, the charm had faded off, we were already distracted by something new. These Unfortunate counterparts of us in the village would also get distracted, from the beatings their mothers would rain on them, because gentle parenting has not even reached New DelhiMumbaiBangalore yet, at least not the single income families.
The disease that has ridden India’s current youth is the Need To Be Cool. We want to show the world we are not dirty, filthy, or behind them in any way. We listen to good songs, we have indie bands, we have our hip hop culture too, just like yours, complete with the pedophiles and shit beats and misogyny. We, too, discard our coolness, as soon as it becomes accessible across classes. A guy from Bandra, Gurgaon, Bangalore can wear baggy jeans with a colorful shirt, only until the outfit does not reach the bastis, the MC Stans, the “chhapris.”1 We don’t have to outsource trash collectors; we are the nation of Ambedkar, and everything he stood against, but that still prevails.
Lollapalooza came. So did Rolling Loud. They brought Coldplay, Linkin Park, Travis Scott, Playboi Carti. INDIA IS BEING RECOGNISED DUDE, BRO THEY NOW KNOW OUR VALUE. INDIA’S HIP HOP CULTURE IS THRIVING NOW. CRAZY! This was the narrative, mostly of men, my age, a little over and under. We still thrive on the external validation from the bade sahabs from pardes, the big guys from foreign lands.
Now roll all of this into a fat joint, the one you might smoke before going to JLN on 29th March. Think of it all. Whatever the West is done with and whatever it wants to hide under the pile of shiny dirt is sent to us, because we are a population that is easily amused and has very low self-esteem.
Everything is Kanye.
People talkin’ shit, but when the shit hit the fan
Everything I’m not made me everything I am…
My fifteen seconds up, but I got more to say
That’s enough, Mr. West, please, no more today
Author’s Note: I have listened to Kanye for over a decade now. I have had pretentious discussions about bipolarity in university hostels over substances. I have found friends due to queueing a song that established us to be on the same wavelength. I have cried to a lot of these lyrics. You will not believe how similar my arc is to his, and not in the mentally ill manner that turns you evil– simply the whole college dropout, late registration, and graduation way (if a real-life friend is reading this, perhaps this inside joke at my life’s expense will amuse you a bit). But I am not my decade younger self anymore. My conscience is not rotten yet. I don’t think I am being too woke when I refuse to attend his concert, even though somewhere in me, I do feel a little bit of that missing out feeling. Then I think of the ticket price, and how my entire friend group can probably pool in to send one of us there. I think of the kind of crowd that will be there. This is not the kind of “treat yourself” that would sit easy on my conscience, in a lot of obvious ways. But a lot of things are not obvious to people lately, and that is scary, to say the least.
mm 🤏
hard relate