Tum ho toh..... Celebrating Friendships

It was one of the new Airbus 321 planes that Air India has begun to introduce on its domestic routes. I tried on the in flight entertainment for the sheer experience of it. For long, I have been used to carrying my own entertainment on board in the form of a book. I tuned into a video channel. The Farhan Akhtar film Rock On was showing. In fact it was about the end when the band Magick is getting ready to play for one lest time. It is a very different world from the one where they began playing as a band in their early youth.


Two of the four have moved on from their youthful sojourn with music and made some thing of their lives – they are successful... success in terms of what we usually define as success. Two others had not been so lucky. At the time of this final concert, one of them n fact was dying and one other was emigrating after not managing to make any thing much of his life in India. How the men bonded together after having drifted away and celebrated their friendship seeing in that bond an imperishable treasure was some thing that stayed with me long after I picked my bags and left the flight.

Friendships form rather easily in youth and wither away almost quite as easily as in the film as we pass out of our schools and colleges and get busy with our lives. If we happen to be in the same line or business or profession, we may stay in touch in the form of an old boy’s club or an alumni association … but the connections remain tenuous at best. Social pleasantries may be exchanged and hands shaken but they remain rituals of inveterate shallowness

We don’t have time for investing in relationships that truly last ; for we are too busy networking – that is the power play of today – seeking out time to meet and connect with people who matter – matter in the professional and career sphere, that is ; not in the ethereal space called friendship.

so we go to parties , seminars and conferences armed to the teeth with our wallets stuffed with our calling cards because we can’t afford not to; not going or going unarmed may mean a lost business deal – a successful deal will mean more parties and networking events and a more power packed business card. And along the way what is often sacrificed at the altar of professional networking is the rich flavor of friendships – friendships that may or may not open professional or career goals for us but will always be a healing spa for our tired and weary spirits.

as my flight descended to land in Mumbai , the closing credits of Rock On came on screen. it said that long after Magick played their last song together, they continued to meet together every week and they were not weary. not in one-dimensional networking where selfishness and self gain is couched in velvet gloves, but in inhibited friendship, they found the lyric of their lives.

“tum ho toh gaata hai dil tum nahin toh geet kahan tum ho toh hai sab haasil tum nahin toh kya hai yahan “tum ho toh hai har ek pal meherbaan ye jahaan”

Surely few gifts and few joys are worth more !

Rock On : There is a price to chasing a dream

In the closing frames of the film “Rock On”, a lilting melody wafts through as the credits flash by …”kuch to arzoo kijiye… phir dekhiye, phir dekhiye………” the screen shows how the guitarist Joe (Arjun Rampal) starts a business of identifying new musical talent and his wife (Shahana Goswami) till now involved in the business of selling fish and entirely frustrated by it finally leaves the job. The other characters in the film too begin to pursue their dreams and passions that they had identified in their younger years but had then chosen to bury it deep as they left the carefree years of their youth behind….

But pursuing one’s dreams and passions is not as easy obviously or else every one would be doing it all the time and there would be no need for exhortations to this end. Indeed the biggest graveyard in the world would not be found in any cemetery but in the arena of dreams turned to ashes, passions buried deep and desires ruthlessly cut down to size before they matured enough to bear fruit.

In the film itself, Farhan Akhtar gives up his role as the lead vocalist and settles into the stressed but predictable and materially comfortable life of an investment banker. Arjun Rampal, who stays a guitarist doesn’t fare as well and he and his wife are able to make ends meet – not because his musical passion pays off but because his wife begins a business of supplying fish to Mumbai’s big and happening parties- she detests the work and the manner of people she has to deal with and the way she has to conduct the business ; but in the end – because Joe is a wonderful guitarist but a terrible sense of career, it is her job that puts food on their table.

The secret of a successful passion chase is persistence. Indeed life as such is about persistence ; but persistence is rather a hollow word when the battle that you are fighting is one that you are fighting alone. In Farhan Akhtar’s case, his father’s intense disapproval of his son’s career as a musician makes him don the conventional role of a banker and a similar lack of support from his family ensures that Purab Kohli ends up as an assistant in his father’s jewellery shop.

Life as the makers of “Rock On” seem keen to emphasize is about second chances all right but it is also about getting the right kind of support to ensure that one is able to capitalize on the chances that come one’s way. Without that support – be it from peers as it happens in the film or be it from any other source, one may get any number of chances in life but they will never get us any where at all.

Most of us do not need to be told to Rock On. We want to; we would love to; we want to spend our life rocking…. It is just that many of us have been stopped in our tracks by blows that have left us lame and crippled…. And now no second chance or second wind is enough to convince us that chasing our passions is a good idea at all…..