Setting of Music !!

The setting was pulsating, rather, because of the music it felt pulsating, strip it sans music, serene and surreal. Such is the impact of music. It has the ability to transform not just a place but also a person. The place in point is Bandra Fort.

Now the above lines are a result of Indian Ocean's invigorating impact. They have a soul in their renditions. A soul is different from a character. So that makes me ask myself, "Which music has character, rather, is it the musician who has the character to play soulful music/melodies etc or the other way around?" Answer to this eludes me. I will search for it and post it soon.

Music, as The Bard said, "be the food of love then play on."

Play on, certainly.

Overrated days like Birthdays etc.

It is simply another date in the calendar and a reminder, for some grim, for those who wear a couldn't-care-less attitude, about the passage of time. Time the ever constant in the mundane, in the chaotic, in the pain, the joy, the ecstasy, the banality, the meaningful and stops at the Dead.

All I am saying is that why do we have to lend so much significance to the already significant? It is a known Unknown. We all know the importance of time. Nothing can ever stop it, our beings will cease to be, Time nevertheless moves and how.

Celebrate every moment in the ticking Clock. Maximise it. To leave some event for the future seems useless. Do it now. However, Destiny says, "What will be, will be and the time has to come for everyone."
It can be perplexing but therein lies the fun!

To Time and beyond. If there is any.

Synchronicity of Multi-cultures

A cosmopolitan city like Mumbai, Dubai, London, New York, San-Francisco and Sydney best understand multi-cultures. Those who live in any cosmo-city witness myriad cultures everyday. Be it on a bus ride, hailing a cab, walking in a park, at a restaurant, work-place, movie theatre etc.

The people in these cities, I think anywhere in the world, experience synchronicity. One of my friends had told me once about his experience in Bombay. He was in Andheri (suburb of Bombay), waiting for an Auto and thinking of his ex-girl friend from Delhi. After waiting for an hour he managed to hail an Auto. The passenger getting out of the Auto was his ex-girl friend. "This was unbelievable, I thought the movies were happening to me." He had no logical explanation to what he just experienced. Synchronicity happened.

Train rides of Bombay, a setting for meeting people from various cultural hues. A Bihari discussing Stock Exchange numbers with a Marathi. A Gujarati sharing his dhokla with a North Indian. A Tam-Bram sharing food with a Muslim. Their respective baggages are nullified by the warm and amiable contact of human beings.

Carl Jung explains it lucidly:
"Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar's gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart throughout the world. There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-hells, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul."

We could call it destiny, fate, kismet. Some events are beyond the realm of human logic and a mind proclaiming to be all cognizant can never decode this one.

P.S. Life continues to delight me. This post has somehow not made too much sense.

Marwari & Poppy Tears!

Since the time I read in the papers about the association of the Marawari community with the Opium trade in the late eighteenth - early nineteenth century, it has led to a gamut of constructs. My first reaction was that of awe and bewilderment followed by what happened to their devil-may-care attitude down the years.

Now the construct in my head of a marwari is very skewed, so i thought. They are docile, amiable, calculated risk-taking folks who will do nothing to endanger themselves and their business. However, their involvement with Opium, spells something else about them. Daring, intrepid and blasphemous. Yes, blasphemous, since they take matters of their religion with great earnest and will.

Now this leads to the prefixed notions that are present in some part of our brains, it could be because of what we have read, heard, been told, seen and experienced. To break the shackles of these preconceived ideas can be challenging. To uncondition conditioning is what I aspire for. It works when everything and everyone is evaluated without judging the contents.

Marwaris as the Poppy Tears exporters or Gold businessmen. Who cares?

'Boulders in the River'

There is always some kind of bickering that goes on between couples. It is the understated bickering and communication thereof that leads to a trajectory of deep understanding. Something the older generation believed in tremendously. It was easy for them to fight over issues than discuss them at length. To sit across the table and exchange views and counter views is a new age phenomena. An excellent one, i think.

There are such short lived relationships these days. Some marriages last for a few weeks, some for a few days (case in point Kardashian) and some are just a long drawn drag, smoke is barely there yet the addiction is difficult to kick. While all these relationships, i am sure, had begun with the vows of forever-ness and a honest intent to keep those vows. Forever-ness, somehow soon is forgotten and what is supposed to be for keeps is anything but that. Remorseful.

If one listens intently to the voices of dissent between couples, there would be strains of laughter, memories and love. They probably will realize that a few boulders in its course makes the river sing sweeter as its flows!

Music - The great Calmer

There are several voices buzzing in the head. Some are saying banal things, others are driving intellectual points, while some are simply reflecting and few are whispering nothings. Then, boom, comes the sound of Bappi Lahiri, popularly known as Bappi Da, singing "jeena bhi kya hai jeena" (living is, well, banal, honestly can't decode this one) So it brings a smile and the voices in my head get drowned by this psyched up music, no nomenclature of music can capture the essence of the "dhoooinsh". Bravo Bappi Da.

To Bappi Da for the music that rules the myriad sound waves in my head currently. Hope this doesn't last too long. Truth is nothing does. Impermanence does though.

Wisdom on the road

It is an observation that some of the most wise advices have stemmed from those inconspicuous people who simply do their business of ferrying folks from one part of the city, sometimes from one city, to the other.

This post is courtesy: one such experience.

Anonymous driver says, “Aadmi agar imaandari se koi bhi kaam kare toh kabhi museebat main nahi padta, agar kismet ki galti se padta bhi hai toh uski imaandari use bacha hi leti hai” (If a man works with honesty and diligence then he never lands in trouble, however, if fate plays foul and he does, then it is his honesty that saves him.)

Now these words ring in my head. He said the most simple fact without much ado. Context to his sentence was nothing, he was pontificating while driving.

There is so much truth in those words, only if it were easy to follow the advice to the letter H.

Another day under the same Sky

Another year. So that's why this whole fuss. I think a majority of people consider this change in a date an opportunity to unwind and reflect on what has gone. I think there is only one kind of Time. Past. Even the present becomes past in a second. Future is never there. Mind has a way of popping constructs and we are so deeply chained by pre-defined sets that any inevitability seems banal.

Struck by meaningless-ness all the time. My reflections are devoid of any baggages and sometimes sense. Too much importance is put on deciphering events and people, it is such a senseless exercise. Let's all be as we are and let others also be as they are, strip all expectations and enter the cave of tranquility.



There is another sky,
Ever serene and fair,
And there is another sunshine,
Though it be darkness there;
Never mind faded forests, Austin,
Never mind silent fields -
Here is a little forest,
Whose leaf is ever green;
Here is a brighter garden,
Where not a frost has been;
In its unfading flowers
I hear the bright bee hum:
Prithee, my brother,
Into my garden come!
- There is another sky By Emily Dickinson