Turn on, Tune in, Drop out

Here's a piece I wrote for the college magazine a couple months back about the hippie movement. Just thought I'd post it here. Enjoy!

The hippie movement of the 60’s was one of the most significant counterculture revolutions in the history of mankind, and played a huge part in shaping the modern society with its lofty ideals. It originated as a consequence of the general feeling of resentment of the youth in the United States towards the Vietnam War and the cold war with the erstwhile USSR during the Eisenhower era. It was also fuelled by a glaring urgency felt by the masses to spread love instead of hatred in the world. The word hippie derives from hipster, and was initially used to describe beatniks, which was a media stereotype for people who liked to indulge heavily in poetry, philosophy and psychedelic substances. The pioneers of this movement were writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg along with jazz musicians like Miles Davis, John Coltrane and others.

The post-WW2 "baby boom" resulted in an abnormally large number of affluent yet estranged teenagers in the early 60’s, as likely participants in a rethinking of the structure of the American society on all levels. This craving to bring about a change, fuelled by decisive social events around the time, served as the intellectual catalyst for the birth of the counterculture. It was also greatly powered by the consumption of mind-altering substances among the youth, which resulted in an explosion of creative and non-traditional thought. The basic objective of this movement was to address key social inadequacies, which included the constitutional civil rights illegalities; racial discrimination, and lack of voting rights among the blacks. Students on university campuses fought for their right to exercise their freedom of speech and assembly, the highlight of which was the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in 1964. Anti-war propaganda was one of the foremost agendas of the hippie movement and a number of protests and rallies were made. However, the bulk of the vociferations fell on deaf ears and the hippie movement slowly became anti-establishment, which was a central fabric for the future of the revolution.

The hippie movement was very closely tied with music and drew heavily from the musical influences of the time. The initial beatnik influences of jazz musicians gave way to the mould of folk music greats such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Hitherto unexplored musical styles were evolving, such as the psychedelic rock music, heavily influenced by the drug culture. “The Red Dog Experience” in 1965 was a musical show organised by Charles Laughlin and it introduced budding psychedelic rock bands such as Jefferson Airplane, The Charlatans, Janis Joplin and The Grateful Dead, who went on to become acts to be celebrated worldwide, and became very closely associated with the Haight-Ashbury hippie scene. Overseas psychedelic band Pink Floyd and New York based The Velvet Underground also contributed heavily to the trend of the counterculture.
The later (post-1965) period was the golden era of the hippie movement as hippies from all over America gathered in San Francisco to create a “free state”. By late 1966, the Diggers, a street theatre group, had opened free stores in Haight-Ashbury which gave away their stock free of cost, and also provided free food, distributed free drugs, gave away money, organized free music concerts, and performed works of political art. Thousands of youth migrated to Haight-Ashbury during this human be-in movement, including many runaway teenagers, portrayed most wonderfully in the song Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan. The undisputed crown of the movement was the Monterey pop festival of 1967 which was the first musical experience of its kind, attended by roughly 20,000 people and it featured artists like The Who, Jimi Hendrix and Pandit Ravi Shankar, who gave a four hour performance on the sitar which left the audience awestruck. It also set the stage for future events such as the Woodstock festival in 1969, one of the greatest musical concerts of the past century.

The hippie movement came to an abrupt end at The Altamont Music Festival in San Francisco in 1970 when the security group, Hells Angels caused the death of a teenage girl even as the Rolling Stones played Sympathy for the Devil on stage. This event sent the whole movement into an ugly downward spiral and by 1972, the whole purpose of the movement was lost and the entire populace of hippies was brought harshly back to reality. Even though the hippie movement is but a distant memory now, the idea left behind by the movement, to break free of social restrictions, live as one with no prejudices or hatred and find new meaning in life, is as germane today as it was then.

Reflections

Last evening, over a cup of chai and a samosa at Raju's chai shop, I saw something that disturbed me from within, and I was at a loss to explain why. Maybe because I felt I've seen something of the sort so many times before that I'd have gotten immune to emotion, hardened to the extent of insensitivity. I was thrown into a wistful thought spiral.

What I saw was something very banal, very workaday. It was the sight of an old beggar, scavenging around for food, with no clothes to drape his ravaged body, and hardly any strength in his lifeless legs to carry him around. He kept going from one pile of garbage to the next, looking for any scrap of food that could help him get past the night. I sat, there, watching him, dumbstruck by the unfairness of it all. Why was I sitting here, in my clean clothes, eating hot samosas, and he, there? What right have I to be in this comfortable state while there are those whose suffering knows no ends? Is it the inherent randomness (draw of lottery, if you please) that all human beings are blessed with? Is it god's doing? Or is it karma? Being an agnostic, I shall leave out the bit about god.

Karma, though, for me, is one of the biggest excuses mankind has ever come up with. To think that one human being suffers while another enjoys purely because of their respective actions is a little too absurd. Why, then, is one born into a nice, well-to-do family, and another into a dysfunctional, hapless family, having to keep his nose to the grindstone just to have a fistful of rice? Is it still karma? Well, they've hardly had any time to do anything good or bad. Shouldn't both of them be given a clean slate to start with? Does it eventually even out over the course of a lifetime? I think not.

No amount of stress, work pressure or professional problems can ever be comparable to a state of starvation, to a state of such abject poverty. In no way can there be a rational explanation for why I am the way I am and he the way he is. Karma might seek to give me a wall to hide behind and placate myself, but the bitter truth is that karma is all too often just a question of faith, like religion. What then, am I to make of it? Randomness? God? Or maybe an explanation as far fetched as karma extending over the cycle of death and rebirth. If only I could find the book, where 'it is all written', I'd gladly burn it to ashes.

Reality check

I was just getting sick of having an empty blogspot coz I din't have anything good to write about. So I just wanna get this dumb "first blog" out of the way. Now the name of my blogspot is "What a wonderful world!". If you haven't figured it out yet Sparky, it ain't, that's just plain sarcastic.

Its a wicked, stinking world out there, and I for one like it that way. Like in the movie Big Fish, when Edward Bloom gets to Spectre and it is totally Utopian (for want of a less beautiful word) , he wants to get outta there, into the city filled with industries and he wants to get rich and successful, not retreat into a life of ascetic beauty, which would be so meaningless and devoid of purpose.

I don't see any beauty in living my life on a picturesque hill rearing cattle. I'd be bored out of my wits. Life's gotta be fast, its gotta be wild, exciting. I can maybe appreciate a life milking a bloody cow when I'm two inches from my end, but I just got a different view of how life oughta be. It oughta be ugly, it oughta be painful. Its only then that it starts getting interesting. Its only when you know pain, you know how tough you are.

The world is just the way it was supposed to be, not too perfect, not too spoilt. And people can try changing it for the better or the worse, its futile, coz the chips are always gonna fall where they would have anyways. Don't mind me, I am just Jack's raging anger.