Losing (and rediscovering) my religion

It was love at first sight.

I was still not of a legally marriageable age, barely halfway through my college education, but the first time I heard them on reasonably good speakers in IITK, I was swept away in an overwhelming wave of awesomeness. All through college, they were a preferred companion, from cold nights through simmering days, from inebriated highs to sobering lows, from boisterous Wing parties to lonely broodings. And then within a couple of years of discovering them, I had a dream come true, a high which lasted for months, with my first brush with them in flesh and blood, 7.5 years ago, which I had tried to capture in words, rather breathless and inelegant, here.

In the interim, I graduated, started working, got back to academics again for a while before getting back to work, even as a few white strands made themselves comfortably conspicuous on my scalp. I experimented with listening to other types of music, both hard and soft, and decided that I had begun to develop a liking for the latter, especially the instrumental kind. I lived in four different places during this time, attended other rock concerts when I could, fell in and out of love and back again and learned a few lessons in life, as the noughties whizzed by. The memory of a midsummer evening in Munich had begun to fade away – but rather disconcertingly, it didn’t worry me that in a few years’ time it might just recede to a footnote status in an otherwise unforgettable summer of 2004. I was becoming a Kafir, an infidel.   

They released another album while I was a student for the second time – I liked it, listening to it on and off, and briefly thought that I had reignited that spark again within me – that rush of adrenaline, but somehow the awesomeness of yore had disappeared – the halo all but dissolved into thin air. I couldn’t explain it rationally – so I ascribed it to age – drifting away from the original Legends of heavy metal, one which had been my single most important reason to swear by the genre itself.

 And then, just when I was beginning to think that my lasting memory of them would be the midsummer evening of 13^th June in the year the Greeks got away with an unthinkable daylight robbery of the Euro Cup, my faith was reawakened. On a dripping late October evening at Palace Grounds in a typically chilly Bangalore, they rocked my world again. The ‘Ecstasy of Gold’ opening, complete with ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ video, sent me right back to that evening in Munich, jolting that memory back into prominence. The goosebumps with 25,000 people singing an entire song together was back. As was the high of chanting ‘Obey your master ..... master …..’ in unison, almost like a cult.

The Gods of heavy metal ruled again. And my faith was restored.

Artists come and go. Playlists change. Tastes in music evolve. Tracks vie for being preferred songs and then fall by the wayside, forgotten after the next favourite comes along. But that is how mortals are defined. Not them.

Metallica. Forever.