Late 80s in a small town of Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh.
Pop music here was called "English Music" and Jackson was its highlight. Even those who did not ever hear his music, knew about someone called "Jaiksan" somewhere in America. They also knew that he could dance - almost like Mithun Chakraborty - who then was the larger than life Disco Dancer of the silver screen.
MJ's new album "BAD" was a great rage among us - school boys then. Though we could only understand "I'm Bad, I'm Bad" in the whole song and religiously sang along whenever the phrase came up, it was his moonwalking we swore by. Practicing the smooth backward slide of the feet on dusty school grounds ruined our nice and dandy Bata shoes- but nothing stopped us.
Around the launch of this album, an English magazine "Sun" announced to release a four-part doorsize poster of MJ in his black dress with hooks and trappings, an image which was featured on the BAD album cover.
Now Sun was not a magazine which school boys could pick every now and then . Also the publishers being intelligent publishers released a part of the poster every month starting from his shoes. The wait for the next edition was unbearable.
Because it was summer holidays, my father bought my eldest brother, who obviously had better Jackson-gyaan than I, an edition of Sun, which carried the first part of the poster - the King of Pop's shoes.
A month later, my brother also managed to get the second edition of the magazine and we could create MJ upto his waist. Many a days, I would imagine where I would put up that poster. When nobody was around, I would try pasting the two portions of the poster to see how the whole picture was shaping up.
But as life would have it, we could never get the next two editions of Sun.
Was it Dad's anger over grades (his not mine as I scored decently) or something happened that we could not go to the lone bookstore in town, I was left with half the Moonwalker. Despite this, I preserved the two parts of the poster for more than a year, praying that I might get two more editions of the Sun to complete the picture.
MJ went up to give us more hit numbers and we grew up to sing along with his songs -verbatim.
Today he is dead, in a twist of fate, leaving an unsung concert- just like my incomplete poster of half the moonwalker.
