A LETTERED SOUL: REFLECTIONS ON LITERATURE, CINEMA AND CULTURE .

THESE ARE THE LEGACIES I HAVE - 2017's ENCAPSULATION

For all its worth, twenty seventeen - the seventeenth moon that crested on the forehead of a ' modern, youth oriented' millennium - realized the worst blemishes of our world in its extraordinary capacity to divide and rule. We thought the worst signifiers of them all- RACE, GENDER, CLASS, HEIRARCHIES OF THE MIND, GENERATIONAL GAPS and the worst among them SEXISM(and even the reverse of it) penetrating down both sides of the aisle - had been abolished from our civilized society's higher, haloed mortal grounds of existence and had been sublimated with a contemporary wisdom seeking to be Rational, Open and mind you, Equal, words that since the Renaissance times have been codified as enlightenment's precursors and standing sentinels. But these vanguards had a hard time digesting this churn towards the negative from the great melting pot of humanity. The pretenses of pushing our agendas of every single aspect being ' far better' than maybe a decade ago were pulled out like spectral masks from every single smug visage and showed us that even if we thought the majoritarian consensus rejected this backward pull, we were ultimately in a tiny spot of wish fulfillment, hoping that this was just a phase. Actually, this was the true face of our infested minds corrupted with too many prejudices and global isolation, inherited from years past and stunted centuries of cumulative growth. So when push came to shove, the pretenses collapsed and all that had been forced to be buried and suppressed under peels of civility and condescension were recovered in no time.

We were supposed to be living in a modern world. MODERN, mind you. Then what warranted this embarrassingly inert display of disregard for all our accumulated tastes of diversity and healthy opinions? In twenty seventeen 2017, was it all a sign of the times to come? It was medieval, almost parochial. It was the year chosen to unveil reality, to let us know and conserve our courage in understanding that our struggles had to be in the nuances of our contradictions. That it was difficult, impossibly brutal out there. Impossibly odd to conserve our graces when everyone was willing to plaster themselves with their pet peeves. Yet some individuals chose to be on the side of time honoured sanity and understood that something was better than nothing. For no century or era or year has practically managed to tie the hands of art and music is the branch that has stirred such propulsive movements of the heart and mind that authority has been brought to its gnarled knees by its mortal coil of permanence. In 2017, the production of thoughts, at the most basic level, honoured artistic propensities to continue making music and at another, sculpted the steely determination to confront and change, ask, enquire and bring in an immodesty of artistic freedom that was full of integrity. Yes, the statements were sober, sometimes tense but always fascinating and were possessed with the power to effect change.

At the end of the day, music created textures, moods and alchemies of such extraordinary versitality, the fate of the world was in better hands as courage was inflamed anew not so much in stubbornly facing the truths but upholding the verbal and aural landscape that gives joy and provokes unremitting trails of thought. MUSIC WAS THE ANSWER. So these closing chapters of 2017 are dedicated to the songs and albums released this year that dared to swim against the tide of ( un ) expected resolves and reached the shore of artistic stability in all earnestness. IN MUSIC IS THE TRUTH.

Now I claim here to have not heard everything that celebrated the fabric of eclecticism but these are the songs which defined the most potent legacy of this fraught year. At the end of the tunnel, these are the statements that stayed. At the end of the day, it was pure music, pure honesty. So in upcoming chapters I write about these songs.

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