Reason To Write: Never?

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January 28, 2005

Never?

Nirvana

The angst is still there, raw and all, even though it has been close to ten years since I first heard them. Classics they were and the two songs which they performed before a live audience were never too far away from my head.

“About A Girl” and “The Man Who Sold the World”. Two songs from that album. One was a cover, while the other, an original composition. The scene of Kurt sitting on a bar stool, playing on his guitar and wearing that humble and non-descript pair of Converse shoes hardly ever left my mind.

There had been evenings when I would play them after a hard day’s work. I would sing to the songs when years ago, the much younger version of me would rock my head (too bad I never really wore my hair long like those rockers of years gone by) to the strum of the guitar or the beat of the drum. They were the ways which I could vent out my frustrations and if not for the fact that the homes of my next door neighbours were separated from mine by a thin wall, I would have screamed my lungs out to the words of the songs.

I remembered once during my unarmed combat lessons (army days) the instructor spoke of his love for grunge music and how these “unorthodox” musicians were really speaking on behalf of our generation and making our frustrations known to the world. As far as he was concerned, they made lots of sense in an artistic manner, which the world had to listen but only a select few would understand.

A few evenings ago, the distressed and weary old me turned to my few Nirvana songs sitting in my hard disk to get my mind off the recent troubles which plagued my life. I started off with “About A Girl” and then moved on swiftly to “The Man Who Sold The World”. I put “All Apologies” next. By the time the fifth song was selected, I felt a temporal relief in my anguish, having “grunged” my pent-up frustrations (with life) out. I was wise enough to avoid playing “Rape Me” and “Smells Like Teenspirit”, for various reasons.

Possibly many of those who once followed the exploits of the three-man set up back a decade ago would have now been, like me, approaching the big 30, holding a day job and carving a niche in their careers. Maybe they would prefer to forget about their younger days of angst, frustrations and the all-pervading fears for their future. I can imagine them wearing their Hugo Boss suits, ties and well-polished shoes and carrying their briefcases and emerging from their spanking new Volvos or Beemers when going to work.

Of course, at the other end of the spectrum, there is still the same old me here.

***

It is interesting how a film, dubbed the African Schindler’s List, premiered recently at a time when the world was fresh from the tsunami shock and the marking of the 60th Anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation by the Red Army. Some of us would have felt the overwhelming despair which stemmed from hearing news of how the death rate of the recent natural disaster was increasing almost exponentially on a daily basis. Over 200,000 dead was grim news indeed, but on an arguably greater magnitude, millions of lives perished more than 60 years ago and it was not the hand of Mother Nature which ended their lives prematurely.

Yet the world looked on then and did nothing.

History, unless one has a photographic memory, is rightly never a favourite amongst local students. Yet, there were times when I would grit my teeth in frustration when I read or heard of people who flippantly dismiss history as "a useless subject". While I remain skeptical about how man would never forget about repeating his mistakes, there is this hope in me that one day, people will stop and think about how precious someone else’s life is.

It is always nice for a political figure to stand up and declare “never again”, but decades since the Holocaust, in our short history of the modern world, we have seen genocides in Rwanda (Tutsi and Hutus) and Cambodia (off the top of my head). Ethnic cleansing is just another convenient substitute for the modern version of the Holocaust. “Never again” they always say, but somewhere else on earth, a machete would still be raised in the name of hatred and ethnic cleansing on a helpless innocent.

Yet the world is looking on now and is doing nothing. While we remember the atrocities and evil which pervaded Auschwitz, Darfur, Sudan remains as a location which most would love to forget.

Humans never learn. Do we?

Posted by D W at January 28, 2005 12:01 PM

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