The Summer of '06

I got my first real six-string

Bought it at the five-and-dime

Played it till my fingers bled

It was the summer of 69

Me and some guys from school

Had a band and we tried real hard

Jimmy quit and Jody got married

I shoulda known wed never get far

Oh when I look back now

That summer seemed to last forever

And if I had the choice

Ya - Id always wanna be there

Those were the best days of my life

Aint no use in complainin

When you got a job to do

Spent my evenins down at the drive-in

And thats when I met you

Standin on your mamas porch

You told me that youd wait forever

Oh and when you held my hand

I knew that it was now or never

Those were the best days of my life

Back in the summer of 69

Man we were killin time

We were young and restless

We needed to unwindI guess

nothin can last forever - forever

And now the times are changin

Look at everything thats come and gone

Sometimes when I play that old six-string

I think about ya wonder what went wrong

Standin on your mamas porch

You told me it would last forever

Oh the way you held my hand

I knew that it was now or never

Those were the best days of my life

Back in the summer of 69

I still remember the first time I heard (bits of) this song : the evening of July 14, 1995. I was walking down one of the empty corridors of Mukherjee West in St Stephen’s, Delhi the night before the opening of college for the autumn semester, 1995, when some of these words came floating through a half-empty door. Suddenly, the music was turned off and instead a question was barked out to me from a distance : ‘Are you a fresher?’ The door was now flung wide open and I was asked to come in. A flurry of some introductory questions followed in quick succession with the music turned back on : When did I move in? What course would I pursue in college? Where did I complete my schooling?

The lights went out around this time, one of the many unpredictable power cuts that I would get used to during the next few years, and I was taken out on to the balcony facing the noisy basketball court.

‘Why did you choose to study physics?’
‘Well, it has something to do about power.’
‘What about power? What does that have to do with physics?’
‘You can want to have power either over other people or over yourself. Those who seek the former become engineers, architects, town planners, business executives, diplomats, psychiatrists, and I.A.S. officers. Those who want the latter could try studying physics.’
‘And what makes you think that studying physics will give you power over yourself?’
‘If you want to study physics, it could be because you have a certain faith in reality. A faith that lying under the apparent chaos, indeterminacies, puzzles and disorders which strike your eyes, there is a deep, cosmic order that you have to find out through the formal beauty of mathematical equations. A faith that ultimately, at some level or the other, everything is interconnected, symmetrical and harmonious, and that consequently there is no genuine randomness or discord in the world. Everything absolutely follows some pattern, even if that elusive pattern cannot be discerned by the physical eye. Once you have this faith, and nurture it everyday, and let it grow in strength, you begin to gain power over yourself.’

Even today I often find myself returning to this somewhat surreal conversation. Those were the days when I was in love in numbers, especially with the abstract symmetry of mathematics which I believed (and, in fact, still believe) to be truly timeless, far removed from the messiness and the muddledness of the world around me. Today it is instead words, their delightful playfulnesses, their passionate absences, their hidden presences, their silent yearnings, and their intractable obscurities, that I am in love with, and yet I still remember the exhilaration I would feel on solving a partial differential equation and knowing why the so-called natural world ‘behaves’ (and, more strongly, has to ‘behave’) the way that it does. The conviction, that there is a deep mysterious order underlying the universe, an order that human beings did not simply ‘invent’ but which pre-exists them, is, in fact, one that has never left me. And yet, there is much in what I believed at that time which makes me queasy in my reflective moments.. I would today not make the sharp dichotomy that I proposed to that senior in the summer of 1995 about seeking power over others versus seeking power over oneself. To begin with, the word ‘power’ and its cognates have become deeply distasteful to me for I now view power and domination as co-terminous; and, for a second, I realised somewhere along the line that seeking power over oneself can often, and does, become a subtly disguised way of seeking power over others. The ponderous dilemma, then, is how to attain the former, in however fragmentary and incomplete a manner, in such a way that it does not lead to the latter. And, third, I believe today that the very attempt to search for a complete explanation for anything, perhaps in the form of a grand theory of everything, will, sooner or later, inevitably lead to (implicit or explicit) forms of violence.

Nevertheless, as I moved through my years at St Stephen’s, I met an increasing number of people who seemed to be devoted, almost fanatically, to this song, until in my third year I finally began to live in a ‘shady’ corridor in Mukherjee West with four other Stephanians who played it at full volume every now and then, and especially in the hour before dinner when three hundred ravenous wolves readied themselves for the descent on the mess chicken. One of them was Vineet who listened to it religiously (almost) every midnight. I always told him that the song was ‘bad poetry with good noise, or perhaps the other way round’, but, perhaps unknown to me, it began to grow upon me, and I would often catch myself humming the tune. On the night after the last exam in third year, Vineet took me on his bike to the restaurant Karim’s, nestled in one of the narrow lanes near the Jama Masjid bustling with countless traders, passers-by, veiled women and shop-keepers living inside the rather ominously-termed ‘walled city’. After dinner, we went for a long ride along the Yamuna, and sometime around midnight sat down under a massive oak tree near the quiet river. The silence, however, was soon shattered by a silver-painted Maruti Suzuki that whizzed past on the empty road above us, its car-radio screaming out the ‘Summer of ‘69’.That was, in fact, the last time that I listened to that song alongside Vineet. He died in a motor-bike accident three weeks later on the road to Jaipur. Apparently, he had been listening to Bryan Adams at full volume on his ear-phones and had failed to hear the loud honking of a truck trying to overtake him.

After some months, in the autumn of 1998, I found myself on a plane bound for Trinity College, Cambridge. I had just moved into my small room in Angel Court when someone with a shock of green hair knocked on my door.
‘Did you arrive today? I am Mark Ingram. Care for some coffee?’
Mark had moved in a few days earlier and his room was dotted with odds and ends, including a gigantic poster of Simone de Beauvoir. At that time, I had only the vaguest of notions who she was (indeed, I was under the somewhat mistaken impression that a ‘feminist’ was a woman who was trying her best to be ‘feminine’), and seeing me staring at her, Mark immediately proceeded to put in a disclaimer. (I soon realised that he apparently found it impossible to say anything at all without loading his remarks with a series of disclaimers.)
‘Oh, don’t get me wrong now. I don’t like her at all.’
‘Why have you put up her poster in that case?’
‘Precisely because I don’t like her at all. You see, imitation is the best form of dislike. Hold on, let me put on some music as the water boils.’
It was the ‘Summer of ‘69’ all over again.
‘Do you like this song? Bryan Adams at his best, eh?’
‘Well, I have been made to like it.’
‘Have you ever thought about the number ‘69?’
‘What about it?’
‘Well, why is this guy singing about 1969? Why not 1847, 1914, 1949, 1959 or 1984? What is so special about the summer of 1969 that he needs to go on shouting at the top of his voice about it?’

It would take me another two or three years before something of the range of significances of the year 1969 would begin to dawn upon me : Vietnam and the cloud of anti-war protests, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, the counter-culture movements, the ‘sense of an ending’, Jimmy Hendrix, transcendental meditation and the Beatles, free love, gurus, psychedelic experience and so on and on. However, as I look back on those years, I now realise that that question put to me by Mark Ingram on my very first day in Cambridge taught me an enduring lesson. I clearly remember feeling extremely stupid on reflecting that I had been listening to the song for three years or so without ever enquiring into why Bryan Adams was singing about 1969 and not just any other ‘damn year’. In his own way, and perhaps even unknown to himself, Mark taught me to question precisely that which I had ‘taken for granted’. As the years passed on, and I was meticulously groomed by some of Cambridge’s finest dons into the subtle art of writing essays for the somewhat daunting tutorials, I constantly kept in mind the question, ‘Why 1969?’ every time I would begin to write an essay, in order to remind myself that I must question precisely that which I thought was obvious to me. It might sound somewhat bizarre to put the matter in this way, but it was a ‘pop’ song that made me start ‘thinking’ in a manner that I had never done before, by diligently and unswervingly pushing a single line of enquiry until the very ‘limits of thought’ (though whether such limits exist at all is another, very interesting, question).

Except on another occasion, I never heard this song during my days in Cambridge. This was during the Christmas vacations in the winter of 2000 when Cambridge was clothed with a fine layer of the whitest snow. Walking through Neville’s Court towards the Backs on the night of Christmas Eve in near-freezing conditions, I stood for a while in the darkness on the stone bridge over the Cam. At that moment, the words of the ‘Summer of ’69’ came floating to my ears through an open window on the second floor facing the river. It was only then that I became vaguely aware of someone standing behind me. I turned around and saw a middle-aged woman, dressed in heavy woollens, staring at me.

‘Yes, those were my best days too. I was nineteen in the summer of 1969, you know? Oh, those mad days! That was the year that I met Tim. We were protesting against the Americans in Vietnam in front of the American Embassy in London. It looks so far away today, and yet lives on in me every day of my life.’
‘Well, I have learnt a lot too from this song. Friends I have lost, and new ones I have met, all lie hidden somewhere along its lines.’
‘Do you study here in Trinity? You did not go home for Christmas?’
‘You think I need a home?’
‘Oh, come on now, I did not say that! But did your mother not ask you to come home?’
‘Well, she died some years ago.’

There was a long silence between us, one that cut through the cold wintry air.

‘Will you walk down the Avenue with me?’

We walked along the bare winter-struck leafless trees in silence. All around us was the beautiful bleakness of the harsh English winter. When we reached Queen’s Road, she paused, turned towards me and looked into my eyes.

‘In the winter of 1975, I lost my baby boy. He died of meningitis, barely three months old. If he were alive today, I guess he would have been of your age. Since then, I have lived largely on the kindness of strangers. Thank you.’

She turned around, and slowly began to walk away towards Grange Road. Her feet left silent prints in the fresh snow.

As I moved through my Ph.D. years, I almost forgot this song, though some of its words would keep on coming back to me once in a while. The only other time I heard it during my time in England was, in fact, on December 30, 2005 when I was travelling to Heathrow in a Stagecoach bus. I could not help reflecting then on how it had, in a sense, welcomed me to Cambridge in 1998 and was, in a manner of speaking, bidding me goodbye in 2005.

Since then the song has never quite left me. On February 10 this year, one day before my birthday, four of my ‘Summer of ’69’ friends who had lived in 1998 on the same corridor in Mukherjee West, St Stephen’s happened, by a series of most extraordinary coincidences, to be in Delhi on the same night, and we all ‘met up’ in a restaurant in South Delhi. It so turned out that all four of them had got married in the intervening period, and I was rather taciturn for a while, not wishing to bring up anything that would, without my realising it, be viewed as ‘politically incorrect’ in such an august company of four women.

Thankfully, one of them broke the ice : ‘I have a heard a lot about you from Vishal. You love to ask a lot of questions, don’t you?’
‘Do I?’
‘So you do! And why is that?’
‘It has something to do with Bryan Adams.’
‘Bryan Adams? Who is he?’

Vishal now turned towards me from across the table, his mouth half-filled with a chicken burger, and growled at me : ‘Man, you still listen to that song? What was it called?’
‘The summer of ‘69?’
‘Yes, yes. It’s been ages since I heard it.’
‘Well, in a way that’s just right. Your summer days are over now.’
‘You mean I have reached my autumn?’
‘Perhaps. But then this is not quite the right company to admit it, right?’

And then the main course arrived, and Bryan Adams was buried under the weight of the chicken and the mutton kebabs.

Some days ago, I went back to Mukherjee West on the final day of submission of forms for admission to St Stephen’s, 2006 - 2007. The corridors were deserted once again, as they had been on that day ten years ago in the summer of 1995. I waited for a while in front of the brown door of my old room, vaguely remembering the indistinct echoes of the ‘Summer of ‘69’ floating down the brightly-lit corridor as hungry hordes had once rushed down the stairs for their dinner.

I walked through the college towards Andrew’s Gate, past the cricket field where a pack of dogs were having a ‘field-day’ and finally onto the main road. A silver-painted Maruti Suzuki glided by, loudly honking at the rickshaw pullers, stopped beside the bus stand, and a young girl with delicately cropped hair and a pair of black goggles stepped out from it. Her garish red T-shirt sported an image of Che Guevara which screamed out : ‘The revolution is in you!’ She walked back towards the car and snarled at the boy sitting at the wheel : ‘For heaven’s sake, Vineet, don’t put on that horrible ‘Summer of ‘69’ again. You are going to go deaf with that noise in your ears. And make me deaf as well.’ I was desperately hoping to hear the retort, ‘What makes you think that you are not already deaf?’, but the poor boy was perhaps too peeved for that. As they say, no man is a hero to his valet, especially when the valet happens to be a ‘liberated woman’.

In any case, I slowly walked past the car, a gentle sadness sinking to my bones. I had lost one Vineet to the ‘Summer of ’69’ many years ago. But the song was living on in and through another Vineet.