{"id":87,"date":"2016-07-09T22:32:06","date_gmt":"2016-07-09T22:32:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=87"},"modified":"2016-07-09T22:32:06","modified_gmt":"2016-07-09T22:32:06","slug":"purple-pain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=87","title":{"rendered":"Purple Pain"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I<\/span>normally don\u2019t like men who have \u201cPrince\u201d, \u201cQueen\u201d, and \u201cBow Bee\u201d in their names. Mallus and a certain Parsi aside. This one, though, is a different banana. This is personal. This is also a rite of passage for a left-wing migrant from Kolkata.\n\nI grew up with Prince; I also grew up as a prince but that is a different babble. Prince gave me ideas. He gave me a voice. But most crucially, he gave me sanction. To say, sing and erupt. I found the courage to express my deepest instincts because of a guy a million miles away, who carried off eyeliner better than any Bengali girl in my \u2019hood.\n\nIn the Kolkata of the \u201990s, you were either well brought-up or you were the son of a trader with a dirty mind. There was no middle ground. My parents were doctors and I liked to secretly listen to Prince’s \u201cDirty Mind\u201d. Here is a lovely morsel from said song:\n\n<\/p>Whenever I\u2019m around u, baby\n<\/em>I get a dirty mind\n<\/em>It doesn\u2019t matter where we are\n<\/em>It doesn\u2019t matter who\u2019s around\n<\/em>It doesn\u2019t matter\n<\/em>I just wanna lay ya down\n<\/em>In my daddy\u2019s car\n<\/em>It\u2019s you I really wanna drive<\/em>\n\n

When Prince sang a song with the words \u201csexy motherfucker\u201d, I first turned crimson and then I turned wise.<\/p><\/blockquote> \n\nMy daddy\u2019s car was a Padmini (even the car sounded like a khandani deity) and you certainly didn\u2019t lay any woman down in it. Let alone drive her. But Prince said it was okay and I believed him. And I believed in him. I discovered what all you can do in a car because of Prince.\n\nOn one of my trips to the barber for my regular, five-rupee haircut in Kolkata\u2019s sweltering sepia-toned CPM afternoons, I found the courage to dictate Uncle Scissorhands to cut my hair like Prince. I drew in the beard with a colour pencil after I came back home. I thought I looked like Prince but my mother quietly clarified that I looked like one of those people who were always roaming around in questionable areas. In motherspeak, it meant I was looking like a painted pimp. But it was okay. I experimented and the experiment bombed in my funder\u2019s opinion. As experiments often do. Prince never said \u201cfail often and fail fast\u201d but I got that from him. I failed often and fairly fast because of Prince.\n\nWhen Prince sang a song with the words \u201csexy motherfucker\u201d, I first turned crimson and then I turned wise. In Bengali, it is common practice to refer to a person you don\u2019t like as a piglet. There was nothing cute about it and the image that always came to my mind when I heard someone being called a piglet was not that of cute, little gambolling piggies, but that person\u2019s mother having sex with a pig. But just like that, after sexy motherfucker, I had a watershed. I realised, one doesn\u2019t have to visually imagine every word one comes across. It was just fine to kick back and groove in life and I learned that because of Prince.\n\nWhen he changed his name to a symbol, I wanted to do the same. But I didn\u2019t know how to do it and also didn\u2019t have the money. To be honest, I also couldn\u2019t think of a symbol fast enough before I grew up. But that didn\u2019t deter me from truly getting the meaning of \u201cwhat\u2019s in a name\u201d on all those \u201cwhat\u2019s in a name\u201d tee shirts. I realised there was nothing in a fucking name. It didn\u2019t matter whose sperm made you. What mattered was what you made of yourself. For a gawky, lisping and introverted Bengali with a mother load of imagination and no friends, that was a diamond in the mind. Because of Prince.\n\nWhen MTV finally arrived, with the delicious Daisy Fuentes (fuck knows how she pronounced her surname. But goddesses, I knew, were cool like that so I didn\u2019t complain) playing Prince\u2019s songs with the little info clip at the bottom left of the screen calling him \u201cthe artist formerly known as Prince\u201d I knew I was ready to join the world. Confidence was a scarce resource, sure. But not the monopoly of the silver-spooned sonsofbitches. Confidence was what you built for yourself. I got that. Because of Prince.\n\nAs I was ready to leave Kolkata, taking a train to never come back ever in a real sense, he switched his name back to Prince and was also being called \u201cthe artist formerly known as \u2018The artist formerly known as Prince\u2019\u201d. And then I got something that is really important for me. I got a glimpse, an insight into the universe \u2013 that shenanigans are just that. And that you never truly leave something that made you, you only come back to it when you are ready. Because of Prince.\n\nAll because of Prince.\n\nI don\u2019t have a guitar but I gently weep<\/a>. I owe you that much. And more. Now rest like a king, you sexy motherfucker.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Artist Formerly Known As Prince was more than a musician. For a gawky, lisping, introverted Bengali from 1990s\u2019 Kolkata, he was a rite of passage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":88,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pop-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nPurple Pain<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The Artist Formerly Known As Prince was more than a musician. 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