Waxing lyrical about the lock-up

In Haryana, hills might be encroached, but jails are alive with the sound of music.

Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage, rhapsodised the poet, in a curtain-raiser to Elvis Presley’s tribute to a jailhouse that rocked. Now the authorities in Haryana have devised a project that aims to show that prison bars could also be of the musical variety. Under the scheme — called ‘Dhun’, but which wags might refer to as ‘Sing Sing’ — the inmates of several correctional facilities in the state have been receiving vocal and instrumental coaching from professional musicians. To add a competitive edge to the convicts’ budding talents, the penal authorities recently organised an inter-prison contest that featured Sufi, classical and folk music, and the winners were felicitated by the chief warden.

While sceptics might feel that those in charge of Haryana’s penal system are going gaga over ragas, a prison spokesperson said that the idea was to orchestrate a training programme that would enable participants to earn gainful employment as bandwalas on their release and reduce recidivism. That laudable objective apart, turning jailbirds into singbirds could well end up paying an extra dividend. The slang term for serving a prison sentence is to ‘do bird’, and Operation Dhun might make jail time in India look like a bit of a lark, and motivate absconders like Vijay Mallya and Nirav Modi to return voluntarily to face the music.