It was in 1984. I was sitting in front of the TV when the pre-Grammy awards program came on. In pre-MTV days, state-controlled Doordarshan had almost no Western pop/rock programming except some horrible Europop that acted as fillers.
So I had absolutely no idea as to what I was going to see. I did not even know what the Grammies were. Good Bengali boys were supposed to listen to Rabindrasangeet and not even think about the devil’s music.
And then I saw him.
I did not know his name. I neither understood the lyrics. Even if I did, I doubt whether as a seven year old I would have understood a song about an illegitimate child.
But I was blown away. By the man in the video. The tip-toe stand, the twirl, the way he moved his jacket. The walk. The beat. And the pavement glowing as he put his foot on it.
Who was this mystery man?
My maternal uncle (mama) had just come back from the US. He had a wondrous cassette player and a few cassettes. One of them was “Thriller”. It was then, over endless loops of that album, that I fell in love with what we then called “Western fast” music (as opposed to the slow Beethoven).
And I also fell in love with the man whose album it was. A man whose name I, and my generation,will never forget.
Michael Jackson.
A year and a few months ago, the UK and of course India went into a tizzy about racist remarks against our very own Shilpa Shetty on Big Brother. The point that most people forgot to stress upon, amidst all the outrage and the displays of patriotism, was that racism in this context was not so much an expression of a nation’s inherent insensitivity towards minorities but an instrument used by one contestant to mentally harass another contestant on a reality show. If Shilpa Shetty hadn’t been brown, she would have been harassed based on her sexual orientation, her weight, her looks or her intelligence—but since Ms. Goody couldn’t get her on the first three and was too dumb herself to get Shilpa on the last, she had to go on her skin color.
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