Hindustan Times
You are my USSR!
The issue: The fall of the Berlin Wall
The soundtrack: Holidays in the sun
Twenty years ago is a long time in human life. It’s even longer in an ant’s life (most of the 20 years being spent in the form of an ant ghost). But it would be safe to say that things in the world have moved even faster than runs accumulated by Sachin Tendulkar over the last two decades of his cricketing career. I mean, now it seems a blip in the bob, but if you blinked in November 1989 (as I did), you wouldn’t have seen the Berlin Wall being breached on November 9, 1989 and thereby ushering in a world where there was no super-duper rivalry between two ideological global blocs.
As historians (an easier bunch to have access to than Red Army soldiers) tell you, the real visible cracks that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall happened over the years preceding the pull-out of the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. While such momentous events were taking place, I was going through the last major transition of my life: half-finishing cheap but exciting Soviet books on physics, still pretending in my head that I was Soviet football striker Anatoly Demyenenko when I kicked a ball, getting seriously into Dostoyevsky’s powerful anarchic humanism and, of course, acquainting myself with East European (overwhelming Czech) dissident (‘samizdat‘) literature. This was around the same time that I first heard ‘mandatory’ classic rock songs (before this it was just random although obsessive, listenings to ‘western music’ that included the Beatles, John Lennon, George Harrison, Dire Straits, Police and plenty of 80s pop numbers) such as Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and, of course, The Wall.
I would ultimately veer away from my Soviet romance (simply because of an obvious supply-demand problem) as well as from my ‘classic rock’ predilictions (simply because of the understanding that 90 per cent of it was bloated, hyperbolic crap) and move away into Soviet-era nostalgia (a prime example of which is today’s blog) and heavily into the music of the Rolling Stones and the Sex Pistols. Psychoanalytically speaking, the Soviet aesthetics suited me. Not only did it stand against what a lot of my America-obsessed friends (and their parents) stood for, but it was closer in spirit and aesthetics, at least in my head, to things I liked: the unhappy-go-lucky mood where sales pitch seduction is replaced by coercion and lies.
Of course, being happily ensconced in my Non-Aligned nation, I could romanticise about the Soviets (’MiGs over F-16s’; ‘Shostokovich over Bernstein’; ‘Drago over Rocky’). But it was the pre-1989 Warsaw Pact countries like East Germany, Poland and, above all, the Czech Republic that made me channelise whatever youthful anti-Establishment poses I was striking in high school just befoe joining college. The people in East Germany, for instance, were increasingly getting restless (the ideal state to be) and hated their communist leaders while having nothing barring rock’n'roll and jeans aspirations from the West. Which was the perfect, intelligent ‘fuck you!’ balance that any 18-year-old can dream of.
So it was not Floyd’s overhyped, overplayed and tiresome ‘We don’t need no education’ — with its horribly overwrought, overplayed chorus, “All in all/ You’re just another brick in the wall” – that came to my mind on the 20th anniversary when Germany’s Humpty Dumpty Wall fell down but the Sex Pistols’ underhyped, underplayed and tireless ‘Holidays in the sun’. It has the singer John Lydon aka Johnny Rotten snarling out the words “I don’t wanna holiday in the sun/I wanna go to new Belsen/ I wanna see some history/ ’Cause now I got a reasonable economy” with the pneumatically driven chorus, “Now I got a reason, now I got a reason/ Now I got a reason and I’m still waiting/ Now I got a reason/ Now I got reason to be waiting/ The Berlin Wall/”
Now, 20 years down the line, I’ve been turned into a fence-sitter. Ironic, isn’t it, considering they’re all now celebrating the fence coming down when I was 18?
(7 votes, average: 4.43 out of 5)
Loading ...Posted by HT Editorials on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 7:56 pm
Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged Afghanistan, Anatoly Demyenenko, Berlin Wal, Bernstein, Czech Republic, Dostoyevsky, Drago over Rock, East Germany, Floyd, Humpty Dumpty Wal, ideological global blocs, Poland, Red Army, Sachin Tendulkar, Shostokovich, Soviet Army
why don’t you reply to our posts now?
[Reply]
All right Mr. I-Am-Oh-So-Urban-Chick-Now-That-I-Travel-By-Metro. What are you tryin’, to prove? “Psychoanalytically speaking, the Soviet aesthetics suited me.” Seriously now!
[Reply]