12/16/2023 0 Comments Indifference awaken i am youtube![]() ![]() He said, “We’ll be fine! We have the sea breeze and that’ll protect us from this virus. ![]() But as I dithered and reeled from the uncertain future now staring us in the face, this elderly man gently mocked my panic and told me not to worry. It would still be nearly ten days before the government would enforce the lockdown, so perhaps the fear was not as concretized at the time. When I spoke with the Gaana singer that final day that I was out “in the field,” I was struck by his nonchalance toward the pandemic. Yet, the number of new cases seems to be on the rise. The city of Chennai is just beginning to slowly awaken from the months-long stupor of barren streets, closed liquor shops and grocery stores, and months of unemployment, hunger, and uncertainty for its residents whose stomachs and homes cannot afford to go eight weeks without work. I am writing this now in May 2020, and eight weeks have passed since the Indian government enforced a lockdown across Indian cities to contain the virus. His reaction sparked a conversation that made clear to me the gulf between our vulnerabilities, past experiences, and future (un)certainties that would result in unequal and vastly different experiences of this pandemic. On my train journey to north Chennai, I had been consumed by headlines about COVID-19, and I asked if he was worried about this virus at all. That March afternoon, we were in the living room of the singer’s house, and after some hours of music, the conversation turned to current events. Now, with YouTube, WhatsApp, TikTok, and the introduction of the form into Tamil film music, Gaana has become wildly popular among Chennai’s youth as a form of north Chennai Dalit self-expression that explores heartbreak, friendships, death, and social issues hinging upon the exigencies of caste, class, and address. Gaana is a musical style that acquired prominence in 1980s Chennai with the cassette revolution, but it originated in the early 20th century as a funeral music popular in Chennai’s earliest informal settlements, when Dalit migrant laborers from around southern India began to work in the precarious conditions of the city’s burgeoning British mills and factories. A chart-topping Gaana singer from the 1990s had agreed to meet with me, and what was supposed to be a casual chat ended up becoming an impromptu house concert for an audience of one-me. My last day of “fieldwork” was on March 14th, 2020. (Fieldwork in a Time of Coronavirus series) ![]()
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