Soniaji and Kenniji get stuck in a lift

I remember when I realised that Bill Clinton was not, in fact, the lost lovechild of Elvis and JFK. It was when I first read that his favourite musician was the execrable Kenny G. From that moment on, Bill was cool no more.

Fast forward eighteen years or so, and sometimes India sounds like Clinton FM. Yes of course there is appalling lift music and hotel lobby fodder all around the world, and no doubt old Kenny makes magnificent royalty cheques in Aarhus and Zanzibar and everywhere in between, but India seems to have particularly taken this sort of pap to its heart and gleefully allowed it to wrap itself around its ventricles and clog up its arteries with this musical cholestrol.

I’ve lived in the same flat now for over eighteen months. There are two lifts up to our floor: one is music free, the other plays Kenny G. One excerpt, about thirty seconds long, loops over and over, again and again, day after day, month after month. We've had this infinite muzak ear-shelling for the best part of two years now, with nary a hint of a ceasefire. Needless to say, given the choice, all sane flat-dwellers plump for the terribly boring, quiet lift. It’s the same on domestic flights, where they bombard you with ghastly music because apparently it’s relaxing. So relaxing that my blood pressure reaches a higher altitude than the plane.

But I suppose you can expect dull middlebrow music to accompany dull middlebrow activities like getting in a lift or going on a flight. Obviously when India wants to be classy and highbrow, it makes good use of its hundreds of years of astounding, beautiful, soul-stirring music. Or so you’d think.

Funnily enough (gratuitous name-drop alert) I recently attended a jamboree with none other than Sonia Gandhi, President of the Indian National Congress and political string-puller in-chief, along with several hundred of New Delhi’s grand panjandrums. During the lulls in lamp-lighting, lengthy speech-wittering and garland-bothering, they played a little music. It was all inane hotel lobby muzak, but one piece went on for about ten minutes, with the same thirty-second refrain repeated ad nauseam. Hang on one cotton-pickin’ minute, I said to myself in my best Arkansas Chuggabug drawl, I know that tune. Rather too well, in fact. Kenny had struck again.

Guess I know which lift Soniaji will be using when she comes to stay.