Karan Mahajan - Family Planning

Like any real band at its first practice session, about three-fourths of the time was spent fussily tuning the guitars and screwing in the loose plates of the drum kit. This gave Arjun plenty of time to study the lyrics. He logged onto the Internet for inspiration. He wanted to track down every last bit of Bryan Adams trivia that Google.com could muster. Wrists tensed in parallel, he was disturbed to find that every American site mocked him — firstly, and Arjun thought, rather unfairly, for being Canadian, and secondly, for being “schmaltzy.” A sonata of solidarity sparked into the keyboard from Arjun’s hands. He searched selectively for fan sites. He looked up the meaning of schmaltzy . It didn’t exist on WordLocator. (He had misspelled it.) He lost respect for the slangy denigrators. Still the evidence kept accumulating. Bryan Adams figured at #49 in a list of “100 Most Common Reasons Couples Break Up.” There was a site started by a Swede who’d been rescued from the verge of suicide by Bryan’s life-affirming hits album So Far So Good (“It cuts like a knife/ oh yeah / but it feels so right” being the operative lines here) but had now, with the accrued knowledge of “so many years, tears, and fears,” realized that perhaps it was better to commit suicide than be a Bryan Adams fan. “Certainly, one receives more respect when one undertakes the former rather than the latter,” the final line of the opening page stated.

Distasteful parody, Arjun thought. He posted a few angry comments on the site’s message board.

1stly I don’t belive yr Swedish. Swedes are respectable people, committing suicide with or w/o music. You are American. 2ndly, why commit suicide? Pls give your address/phone and I will gladly use the reel of my destroyed tape of 18 Til I Die to fish out your intestines via your mouth, okay? Death guaranteed, promise.

Further, before you commit suicide to end your “hard knock life” here is a picture of me.

He posted the picture of a malnourished African child.

Then another message.

Sorry for previous, just joking!!!!! Picture however is okay.

PS>>>Have you ever really loved a woman?

He posted a picture of the actress Aishwarya Rai.

But he hadn’t even gotten to the reviews.

Bryan Adams’s hit song “Everything I Do” occupied the #1 position on the UK Charts for a record sixteen weeks. The song itself is best described as a ballad-to-permanently-put-an-end-to-the-genre-of-ballads. With his constipated I-ate-Rod-Stewart-for-breakfast vocals, a steadfast desire to rhyme desire with fire, night with right (as in, I am going to do [something sleazy] with you tonight / how could something wrong / feel so right, a construct he has used twenty-one times in his career), liar with desire, fire with higher (ire, mire, choir, dire, sire are all considered too verbose for his oeuvre) and truly massive ability to insinuate his god-awful crap into just about any soundtrack, Bryan Adams is STILL the best singer-songwriter to emerge from Canada in years.

Racists! Hating Canadians!

A Customer Comment on Amazon said:

The real problem is that Bryan Adams lacks edge. He is too syrupy to even be a guilty pleasure.

Now this simply killed him. Guilty pleasure? Excuse me? Clearly, people in the West were so overdosed on luxuries that they’d begun to crave art that was damaging, challenging, difficult, edgy. Perhaps they should come to India for a day. Take a walk in a slum. Get hit by a scooter and lose a couple of limbs while the gathered crowd officiated over your wallet. Feed some suicidal farmers. Or wait: Wasn’t it better for a farmer to commit suicide anyway than to be rich and listen to Bryan Adams? Yes, of course. Stupid fools. They’d start appreciating their so-called “guilty pleasures” if they’d lived through tragedy.

But despite his mental tirade, Arjun was shaken. He’d come into this thinking that Bryan Adams was his last remaining friend and had learned, much to his consternation, that he was Bryan Adams’s only friend as well.

Then Bryan Adams betrayed him. It happened in the body of an interview that was posted online.

INTERVIEWER: As long as we are on the subject of “Summer of ’69,” just how autobiographical is the song?

ADAMS: Some parts are autobiographical, but the title comes from the idea of 69 as a metaphor for sex. Most people thought it was about the year 1969.

“Did you see this?” asked Arjun. “Did you fucking goddamn see this?”

Ravi wasn’t interested. “We should be practicing man — you should be practicing.”

“Sorry man.”

“No, no, it’s fine man,” said Ravi, “but we need to decide what ten songs we’ll start with. Then I need to make sure I’m timed correct with Deepak. We also need balance, man. Balance. How many acoustic songs, how many ballads, how much smashing? You know? Also, are we doing covers or originals?”

No one listened to Ravi. He started to bitch. He emphasized casually that his bandmates were fags and tapped his drums with a light feminine touch to show that he wasn’t exactly thrilled that they were practicing in his house.

Arjun conceded, “Let’s do this, Ravs. You can pick the songs, okay? Any songs you like.”

Big mistake.

Soon they were playing “The End” by The Doors, an eight-minute odyssey during which the band members made various, disarming discoveries about one another, as men often do during long trips. Most monumental of which was that Anurag didn’t really know how to play the bass guitar. This had passed unnoticed at first because Anurag had obviously spent plenty of time studying the angle at which a guitar must be slung over one’s shoulder so as to appear unfailingly cool, and also knew that C-Major and D never sounded bad. In fact, if it wasn’t for Deepak, who derived his confidence from deriding others, they might never have noticed.

But now even Arjun came down on Anurag. “Anu, you’re a bloody bastard.”

They remanded him, in a historic decision, to the spot of synthesizer player — a decision that saddened Ravi but one, as he would acknowledge months later, that added a dimension to their sound that none of their compatriots, especially those fuckers Orange Street and Parikrama, could lay claim to.

So it came to be. Of the four of them — Ravi, who asked poignantly why Indians didn’t have garages; Deepak, generally using his sporty sadism to deride his bandmates; and Anurag, who was no longer pretend-plucking his guitar — only Arjun continued having fun. He was screaming. He was singing into a pencil box. He was opening and closing the pencil box, taunting his own lips. He went to the bathroom while a long solo occurred. He rapped a snippet from 2Pac when it seemed apt (“All Eyez on Me”). Launched into esoteric mumbo-jumbo (“Calling on Onion Transit, Calling on Onion Transit, Radio Delete Europe”) while craving a glass of lemon juice. One minute he’d be serenading; the next he was reminiscent of a Doberman tied to a gate barking at oncoming traffic.

The question is: How is he singing?

“How am I singing?” Arjun sneered.

“Okay. Good. Fine,” said Ravi. “But try not to scream. Actually: Don’t. My Dada and Dadi are sleeping two rooms from here. You’re screaming nonstop. Anyway, control it; otherwise your voice will go. There is no good way to fix that. You can drink water and hot chocolate, but—”

“But screaming is what all these fellows do.”

“That’s true. But—”

Troubled silence.

“Let’s suicide him,” said Deepak.

Seconds later, they piled on Arjun, and this time his screams were real. The band had attained its homoerotic ideal.

When they started their next song — once they had tuned and tuned and tuned — the electricity went. At this time the four boys did not recognize how big and important a role power-cuts-as-sound-effect would play in the historic sound they were inching toward; how the Delhi Vidyut Power Board collapsing was the sound of a million people moaning in one syncopation, one forced fadeout of a guitar, only Arjun’s voice and the drums floating over the remains of what had once been a song.