Music is so ubiquitous that it takes conscious effort to be in silence. Screen savers, cell phones ringtones, while on hold waiting to be connected to be a real human, public places, car stereos, the home theatre system and much else in between is replete with music. It makes perfect sense to take a day off from music even if for contemplation on its exuberant profusion.
I have come to that point in life when discovering new music and genres is increasingly tiring even boring. No longer is a "new unlike anything else" sound worth seeking out. Chance discoveries are welcome but very rarely has it enthused me enough to check out other works of the artist or even the full album if one song caught attention. There is an abundance of music tinged with nostalgia that is easier to turn to for comfort - just like soul food is easier to reach out to than the finest gourmet delicacies.
Great music once needed to be sought out with great effort but now everything is a click away and some loose change to download. Such easy access somehow makes even the very best less desirable. Many of us have enormous collections of music that we always mean to listen too but end up only stockpiling more and more. Music has been tainted by the same consumer culture that fills our lives with a surfeit of things that we have little use for.
An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
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