YES, ALL THAT GLITTERS IS NOT GOLD


























Is this the real life?

Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide
No escape from reality
Open your eyes
Look up to the skies and see
I'm just a poor boy, I need no sympathy
Because I'm easy come, easy go
A little high, little low
Anyway the wind blows, doesn't really matter to me, to me


- From the Freddie Mercury song 'Bohemian Rhapsody'
Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Michael Jackson and Freddie Mercury… I have adored them all. They were all the ultimate showmen… electrifying on stage… Stupendously larger-than-life cult-figures. If a singer’s success and stardom, as a performer, has to be measured against any bench-marks, certainly, here are those bench-marks!

But, then, just as so many of Shakespeare’s best-loved classics are great tragedies, the dizzy lives of Elvis, Lennon, Jackson and Freddie have been just that - colossal tragedies! If the end justifies the means, I, for one, would never ever place such heroes – now - on high pedestals for emulation… I would rather choose singers, actors, performers – in one word, celebrities – who are moderate and less volatile…

Yes, so often, I had been swayed away by the magnetic stage-persona of stars like Elvis, Lennon, Jackson and Freddie. I was a little school-boy when Elvis and Beatles fever spread like an epidemic. I had just stepped out college by the time Michael Jackson and Freddie Mercury set the stage on fire… I still remember watching the LIVE-AID London concert telecast on TV on 13 th July, 1985. That was the day I realized the charisma of an otherwise odd-looking performer named Freddie Mercury…Similarly, was the charisma of skinny Jackson…

Yes, as a young man, I, too, had coveted such success…

But, as years rolled by, and as I saw the tragic end of my ‘idols’, I saw a shift in my perception, too…

All that glitters is not gold… I settled for good-old songs, with scintillating melodies… which were low on fanfare and frenzy…









My young son and many of my students have been asking me, these days, to watch Freddie Mercury’s bio-pic ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. They have been literally blown away by the movie and Freddy’s life. I am not surprised… At their age, I, too, had been, you see!









“I would love to watch this movie,” I tell the young ones… I am honest when I say this… Just as honest as when I say “I would love to read again/watch again an Othello, a Hamlet, a King Lear and a Macbeth… even a Romeo and Juliet and a Julius Caesar!"

I think, for most of us, the idea of ‘Success’ under goes a great deal of shift… just as the idea of ‘Life’ does…



GERALD D’CUNHA

Pic.: Internet/Daily Express

Videos: YouTube


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