1. Try to identify which one is a representation of a rural state and which is a representation of urbanity.

2. What is it about the sounds used that gave you the cues to identifying the two tracks as urban-rural?

3. What are the spaces within which these songs proliferate? Do you get a sense of ‘high culture’ and ‘low culture’ by looking at the spaces that would house these two tracks?

4. In spite of the fact that both the tracks deal with the same content—folk songs—they both aim at a different audience and space. Think of another such example where this phenomenon can be noted.

These two audio clips are a good illustration of the city-village binary that can be identified at an extra-textual level. Both the audio pieces deal with a certain repackaging of ‘folk’ music. Remo’s music is a re-mix of the folk music with new sounds of the Asian underground and urban lounge music added to the original song. Ghosh’s track on the other hand is an attempt to re-create the ‘original’ and ‘authentic’ sounds of the folk song.

We can slowly then tease out that spaces are not mutually exclusive as places can be. For instance, the house that you live in can be specifically identified as your private place and there are boundaries, which separate the private from the public.

Similarly, the city and the village, though often blurred by the suburbs and highway development projects, are still exclusively identified as the city and the village. However, when we start talking about the village and the city as spaces we realise that the binary is not as clear as it seems. We can perform a small activity to illustrate this point.