Wine, Woman and Song - Part Troix

And now for the finale. Classical-Hindustani-Vocalist meets Head-banging-metal-head. The result? Why, its Chip, ofcourse. Chip’s musical tastes are complex and ummm... developing. Being two crazy music buffs, there was no question we would inculcate our progeny with love for music, if he was not already born with the said love or more correctly the music gene. The question was which music. No Baby Mozart and Baby Bach and Baby Handel and Baby whatever-other-composer you can think of for him, declared BigGeek. I concurred. After all, no Bach, Mozart or Pachelbel was ever written solely for babies’ ears. Regular CDs of Bach and Mozart and Pachelbel from our collection would do just fine. As would Kishori Amonkar and Mallikarjun Mansur. I said. As would Dreamtheater and Symphony X, he continued. Wait. What? Nononononononono. I shook my head vigorously from side to side. Embryonic ears are way too immature to fully comprehend the complex intricacies of the prog-metal genre, I said in my nicest, soothing voice, gently rubbing by bulging belly. (Read: Our baby will be born deaf if he is subjected to the decibel levels of heavy metal in-utero, so, it’s off limits in my presence). True, said BigGeek buying what I had just said. But he can enjoy the rhythms, that’s all they can really hear inside their fluid filled home. Higher frequencies get attenuated when transmitted through fluid, you know. Thus spake BigGeek.

I wasn’t quite happy with this. And I complained. To my MIL, and to his MIL and whoever would listen. But BigGeek would not hear of it. And Chip was fed a daily dose of the classics (on my daily 2 hour + commute) and prog-metal when I was with BigGeek at home. So much so, that BigGeek asked me if I wanted to go to a Steve Vai concert at one of my favorite auditoriums (think jazz café atmosphere). I shook my head. I was eight months pregnant. “But you love the bread pudding there.” I was sold. We went with our friends and I brought an extra coat along to put on my belly incase the decibel levels reached baby-unfriendly proportions. And expectedly, Chip started to move a lot – I thought he was jumping and getting startled with the all the noise and we decided to go home.

It was only when Chip was about 9 months old that I realized otherwise. Chip loved heavy metal and hard rock. He first clapped his tiny hands to Deep Purple. He cried out in utter glee and clapped them happily as the opening riffs to Smoke on the water blasted from the speakers. He head banged to Dream Theater and LTE and Steve Morse. And when he learnt to speak, which was the first song he sang? David Lee Roth’s Shyboy. For all the Bach I made him listen to, this is what I get. Yet, I like to think he likes Bach and all Baroque music. He falls asleep instantly. So maybe not all hope is lost.