Michael Jackson’s dead. Long live…

By abhishek at 27 June, 2009, 2:08 am

Why a post on Michael Jackson on an Indian blog? Why not talk about the legendary Sarod maestro Ustad Akbar Ali Khan who died of renal failure in San Fransisco than about some Afro American entertainer chocking of Cardiac arrest somewhere in LA. Google hits? May be. May be more…

Back in 1996, we didn’t know what a “star” was. SRK was beginning to shine. The young Amitabh’s flight to another orbit was seen only by our parents. Sachin Tendulkar came close to being the greatest commodity on earth for all adolescents living in a country which was liberalized barely four years ago. In school, as back benchers, during breaks, we would painfully pretend to talk effortlessly about Boris Becker and Sampras to show off some “international” news and trivia about celebrities and events. There weren’t many avenues of information back then. Technology was still pregnant with the internet and we didn’t have the 24X7 news channels manufacturing NEWS to fill in time. And during this time out of nowhere we got a taste of what stardom was and what ‘celebrity’ meant when Michael Jackson landed at Andheri Sports Complex in a mock space shuttle to perform to a crazed 50,000 audience packed in a place which could take far less. I was 14 then.

…I didn’t attend the concert. I read about it the next day in the then black and white Times of India. We also had MTV which played Jacko’s performances from 30 different countries at the time and that’s when I got to know that the words ‘living legend’ were far more than just a phrase from Balbharati English Gulmohar Chapter 5. A common thread in all his concerts was the sustained hysteria that embraced his audience while he performed his tricks to a hypnotized mob of screaming and screeching people.

All I know was that as a kid, I learnt that an individual can be a ‘sensation’. We weren’t his greatest fans. Heck we didn’t even understand the words coming out of his mouth, but we liked what we saw on stage. We even got a license to the pelvic thrust and the crotch gained respect among us and scorn among our teachers. Our alibi was, ‘Michael Jackson does it.’

Today, he is dead. His bad health that had prompted obituaries a couple of years ago are now being published. 24 hours ago, Google feared that their servers were being attacked until they realized it was ‘Michael Jackson’ who prompted a zillion search queries. In the internet community, Twitter and Facebook are mourning the loss. Among the traditional media, The Economist has done a shoddy job with a hastily written half baked story on the man who they think will be remembered more for his Wacko life style than for his work.

What does all of this mean to us? Should we care to know the man behind those strands of hair dangling around his eyes and the multiple layers of skin that Jackson wore? It’s not worth it. Why did I spend a few minutes to write this? ‘Coz it was a ‘first’ for me. I got to know how one man can make the world do a little jig. You gain that kind of reputation over time. You get one shot at life and what a heck of a way to live it.

Never seen you before! Subscribe to RSS feed get regular updates from my blog.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed! Hope to see you again