How NOT to Share Feedback with Artists

My search for performance coaches has not yet yielded a viable one. These individuals are highly accomplished and trained individuals whose fees are like sledgehammers, something someone making a living in India will struggle to meet.

Hence, I turned to my extended friend circle and asked around. Basically, I texted a select few friends to query if they had such a skillset, and if they did, I asked if they would be interested to coach me. In all fairness, it was not so difficult to find the likely candidates. Both the people I got in touch did have the skillset, one of them, said they could work with me. Yesterday evening, I had my first meeting with the one.

It’s a he. It’s a he who I have had a physical relationship with. It’s a he who has been there for me, by my side, in some of my darkest phases. It’s a he who has given me unforgettable experiences of various kinds. It’s a he who has been consistently welcoming toward me in the several versions that I have iterated myself through. I’ll refer to him as SP.

SP, in a nutshell, said that the most important thing that I need to do is to believe in myself and my potential. He wants me to be confident to ‘market’ myself and work on my networking skills. He thinks that one needs to have a certain blend of arrogance and indifference toward the world. Our meeting ended with the promise of a few more at the very least.

I was also left with an assignment. Somewhere in the middle of my narration of what I thought ailed me in terms of sharing the output of my creativity with the rest of the world, I mentioned that I have had a few traumatic experiences while attempting it previously, with some of them being with people what one would refer to as “friends”. He asked me to write down two such experiences, which will immediately follow this. I am to share these with him and we are to discuss these in our next meeting.

Traumatic Experience #1

Age: 21
Year: 2001

I had just recorded and mixed my first original song called Castle Without A Rock. The song/lyric writing, and all the performances (guitars, bass, drums, and vocals) were by me. The song itself was about the experiences that we (my close friends and I) had had around our first-ever concert as part of the New Year's Eve celebrations for the coming of 2000 (Y2K).

The landmark album Parachutes by Coldplay had been released only a few months before, and the hit song Yellow was on everyone’s minds. The reason I mention is that I thought it was a masterful song arranged relatively simplistically, which is what I was attempting to go for in my song.

It was late afternoon on a mid-summer day. As soon as I finished a decent mix for the song, I exported it in the mp3 format, copied into a portable USB drive, and ran over to my friend’s place—our usual meeting place.

The house was that of a friend who was much older than the rest of us. He was a music connoisseur and had been collecting CDs and records for years. He had a high-end hi-fi at his place. On that particular day, we were three—the older friend, a younger friend (who since then went on to be a drummer in many bands I have played with), and I.

I excitedly announced what I wanted to share with them, and I figured out a way to play the song on the hi-fi. My friends did not demonstrate any excitement. In fact, halfway through the song, the older friend started laughing, which prompted me to stop the playback. In the ensuing conversation, I explained what my intent was (in terms of artistic style). I only remember getting more chuckles and laughter. At the end of my explanation, I remember receiving some critique (on the following lines) from the older friend:

“Such work will never be received well. You might as well as give up on writing/performing music. You shouldn’t set high hopes for being a professional musician.”

Years later, I would take courses on Coursera, with some of them being on songwriting and musicianship. One of the important aspects of every such course is the importance of learning to share feedback with peers. The entire focus is on the need for kind, constructive feedback, with strong advice against harsh and hypercritical ones. I guess my friend did not know this, despite him being a popular and successful teacher in accounting.

I don’t remember my younger friend sharing anything on the song. This despite him and me having been jamming regularly for several months and having dreams of being in a band and writing songs. Years later, I remember him coming around and admitting to how highly he thought highly of some of my later work.

This incident was followed by another traumatic incident with the younger friend’s family. These two incidents were triggers for my eventual move away from Thiruvananthapuram. The incident also started the gradual severance of the friendship with the older friend. Although I continued to work with and be friends with the younger one, things have never been really the same.

Traumatic Experience #2

Age: 28
Year: 2008

I had just released an EP of five of my songs on MySpace. Although I was sure of the quality of my songwriting, I was aware of my production and performances not being up to the mark for radio airplay. The songs were actually recorded with the aim of a submission for a talent hunt by the premier indie record label then. The idea was for me to showcase my work so that they would consider me signing with them as an artist under their label.

Back then, I was actively involved in networking in the music scene, being part of two popular bands on the rise. I also personally knew many active musicians and was friends with some of them. Internet chats were popular. I had just struck up a chat conversation with one of the scene guys on MySpace.

He was someone who I respected and looked up to at that time. He was funny and charming and was part of at least two successful bands. Later on, I’d realize that he belonged to a clique of musicians who were fortunate enough to know each other from their school days, with their collective might propelling them to the top of the indie music scene.

I remember thinking that I will ask his opinion as to how to go about taking my project on live touring, considering that he and his bands were doing that consistently for a few years. I had shared the links of my songs and asked him for his opinion. The lasting memory that I have of this conversation is him telling me this:

“Who is this fucking singer, man! He is so baaadd, oh my god. I have never heard worse singing in my life!”

I left the conversation with him and have never talked to him properly since then. This crushed me in ways that I can’t even describe. It triggered my reluctance to share my work with my friends and “scene guys”. It also created roadblocks for me to share songwriting ideas with my then band, which I partially overcame in the coming years.

Like with the previous incident, I experienced a life-changing traumatic event soon after. This time, I would almost lose my partner to near-fatal health complications during his visit.

He had come to Mumbai from New York City, with the intent of figuring out a way to eventually move to India to be with me. In the course of the next few weeks in India, and in the following months in the US, he would go through multiple devastating health events which would render him in a state of dementia, where he would not even recognize me or our relationship. This wiped out our bank accounts, and would eventually result in me failing my exams for the first time in my life.

The series of unfortunate events triggered the darkest phase of depression I think I have gone through. I would spend several months toying with the idea of suicide. Eventually, with the help of some close friends and the partially-recovered partner, I started taking medications for depression. I somehow found the courage and drive to give my post-graduation exams, and would eventually pass them on second attempt.

On the positive side, this incident also guided me to explore ways to improve my voice, and I eventually even found a vocal coach, who restored a lot of the confidence that I had lost. Eventually, I would find the courage to share my work with a select few friends, and most of them would end up having startlingly different opinions.

The band that I am in right now includes two such people. I remember having played my songs on the car stereo on a ride back from a rehearsal. I was only seeking feedback on my choice of guitar tones. After listening to a few songs, they would tell me how awesome these songs are, why I hadn’t yet shared these with them, and that they would love to work on these songs in a band project.

PS: The one thing that I realize after my first meeting with SP is that performance coaches (and performers, as a matter of fact) are those individuals who have figured out ways to overcome their self-doubts and negativity in a consistently replicable manner.

A former Mumbai medical resident’s take on the suicide of a Mumbai medical resident

I’m a former medical resident from Mumbai. I am in a Whatsapp group with my peers from Medical College. As expected, there is an active conversation in the group about the suicide of the Dalit doctor in Mumbai, allegedly due to casteist slurs by senior residents. Along with that there is a relatively healthy conversation about religion, hindutva, NDA, the 2019 elections, Modi etc. I generally keep myself quiet in this because of several reasons. But I decided to break my silence and ended up posting this.
Considering that I did my post graduation from Mumbai, I guess I can throw some light on this. It's a bit of a rant, but I hope to address a few points.

Racism (regionalism) and ragging/discrimination go hand in hand in my hospital. In my case, casteism was not applicable because I was born to Brahmin parents. But I did get discriminated for being from the the South, being different, being a musician, etc. despite being not too bad at Hindi. The people who perpetrated  the coincidental happened to be, voila, upper caste Hindus.

This discrimination is more among the senior residents upward. The nurses, assistants, and staff were super nice to me. So I was able to pull through.

I had to isolate myself from orthopedics/surgery etc residents because these departments seemed to have more people with such tendencies. I thankfully got a resident from psychiatry (someone who thought like Sebind, ironically) as a room mate. That led me to me hanging out more among his friends. Eventually, I came out to them and they were super cool with that.

In other words, I was more accepted by residents from other departments who were generally broadminded.

Most of you don't know that that I have been under treatment for depression. You may remember that I was on the quieter side of things in my first three years in our college. I have had suicidal tendencies through my undergraduate, postgraduate, post-postgraduate lives.

I eventually got diagnosed and treated at the end of my postgraduate tenure. One of the reasons that I took a sabbatical was because of this discrimination/ragging aspect, which seeps through the hierarchy everywhere, but especially in North India in surgical fields. As someone said, for every publicized suicide, there may have been 10s not publicized, 100s of suicide attempts, and 1000s of victims who have somehow managed to pull through. Like me.

What about Mumbai itself? I get discriminated on a regular basis because I'm South Indian and because I'm dark. Restaurants, pubs, hotels, live events, what not.

The common denominator in all of this is this. Lack of "education", relative upper caste origin, religiousness, lack of evidence-based thinking, all leading up to herd mentality and lack of tolerance.

Guess what drives all of this? The current government. They may not commit or admit to atrocities, but they still don't clamp down on happenings. There is no open stance apart from empty platitudes. Who are they serving? The corporations. Who's benefiting? Upper caste more than lower castes. Who's feeling insecure? Any minority, let it be religion, caste, orientation, gender, etc.

Whatever truths/lies people want to tell themselves to put a coat of paint on what's going on, I will not believe it because I'm a minority in many counts, despite being born upper caste.

And the irony is that these trends are so evident in my own family/extended family, my partner's family, my ex-orthopedic peers, and some among us here.

Guess some of you may get a hint of why I (have preferred) prefer to distance myself from some of these. Basically, I'm trying to protect myself.

All I have to say is this - the world is going darker for the minorities, including the economic one. This is being driven by religion, which is one of the most potent forces that can be harnessed to bring and keep people to power. Such trends are cyclical (~20 years), but the extent of damage unleashed on the persecutees can take 100s of years to reverse.

Introspection

I posted about suicidal depression yesterday on my Tumblr Blog - Neverlast. I think it's apt here as well.

Introspection - in suicidal depression

I suffer from depression. During the worst phases, I feel absolutely worthless being alive. Yes, I have thought about suicide several times, and was on the verge of it twice.

I have been thinking about ways to teach myself not to be stupid and not be unempathic to your loved ones. I irony of this strategy may not work out well when your mind is flooded with negative thoughts, when you won’t feel that your suicidal thoughts are stupid and that what you are about to do will hurt all of the people who you love and love you.

In a recent such suicidal thought spree, I decided to list down the people who I may hurt. All of the ones that sprung immediately into my thoughts had some kind of negative associations linked to them - e.g., family, boyfriend, ex-es, childhood friends, friends. All of them would hurt, but in ways that can be compensated by them realizing that I was a worthless piece of shit after all.

Then one image started floating, soon followed by some others, and all of them were similar to each other in an unexpected, strange way. All of these “people”were different from those who I mentioned earlier in some way that matters to me.

I started wondering what the underlying commonality in them all? Of course, all of them would hurt if I took my life. However, their hurt for what I did would be too unbearable for me - that is, just thinking about these wonderful “people” hurting because of me made me feel guilty about what I was planning on doing.

Although it is somewhat complicated, but still logical in my fucked up brain. And it worked!

A Streetcar Named Desire - All About My Insecurities

Yesterday, I went for a home-theatre movie triple bill at my friend's home. I expected it to be pleasant - the movies, my friends, and the whole experience. It was almost totally pleasant. I was wishing for just the one thing - if only I could leave my mind back home. My insecurities keep popping up everywhere as potential triggers. They indeed did here!

We watched three classic movies - 'A Streetcar Named Desire', 'All About Eve' and 'All About My Mother'. I watched two and a half as I felt sleepy and bored (I don't know which preceded which) through the first one. Apart from a couple of friends of Marlon Brando's who titillated my nonexistent tits, so to speak, I wasn't touched, moved, aroused, amazed, astounded, or even interested.

After Desire, we watched the other two and I was increasingly pleasured by the two others - especially 'All About My Mother'. My friend had chosen these movies as a planned crescendo because Mother had so many references to Eve and Desire. The movies were great, but I wished I could have watched them alone, so that I could pause when I wanted to, sleep when I needed to, and research when I'm forced to. That way I don't need to be wary of the potentially hurtful discussions afterward, when I'd be clueless as a kitten to be swooped off by a vulturous eagle.

See, I don't even remember the name of the characters. Almost everyone on the planet seems to know them by heart. And I can't recollect the most obvious of such details without Wiking/IMBDing. I'm pathetic, I know. But I'll leave whining for a little later.

I'm a tired man, I must remember. I've too many things on my plate that I can't even possibly taste and I'm full almost upto my lower esophagus. I'm on antidepressants and antipsychotics which supervene on my efforts to maintain wakefullness. I've a minefield of a mind full of blackholes about insecurities of lack of knowledge and exposure to arts, history, and what not.

In such a state, it was foolish of me to have attempted instant redemption. No offence to my lover and friends, I'm not quite up to the mark. I suck at most things that I want to be good at. I agree that I'm good at most things that I end up devoting time to. But there are far too many things, far far too many things, and too little time, which might have been curtailed had it not been for these pills that I'm on.

No one can save this wreck from sinking. But how much more can it float?