What are they thinking? When they go drop a bomb on a market street? Or put a burning tyre onto someone? Or to rape and mutilate someone? IS it the way to win your vengeance or a way to get closer to god or just a sheer lack of direction. Who is the enmity directed towards? A sect or mankind? OR is it just an implosion that manipulates itself in a much perceivable way? What were we before we were born? What will we be after we are gone? We get to choose how we live for at most 50 years of our lives. The rest, we are incapacitated in some form, either too young or too old, out of which we sleep for a third of the time.. Why do we then need to take that little spec of time from someone in this vast realm of the existence of things that we can't even come to fathom? Our lives are what we make of it. Why then take away the very right that we cant give anyone else but ourselves? To Live! Is it a high that transcends all other highs? Is it just a lack of having things to do? What is it?
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The magic of Ghazals and Shayari..
Listening to Abida Parveen's rendition of Ghalib poems. Its beautiful.. Her music is soulful. It makes you feel content in your heart despite all the thoughts in your mind. It drops lyou right into your heart. It lets you be. It stills you. And even before I realize Im in a trance and I'm hoping it never stops playing. Its a sweet nostalgia of the times lived. I'm so grateful to have been brought up around a place where so much imbibed from a lot of people from different walks of life. It's nourishing to be associated with the festivities of so many, listening to varied genres of music, celebrating in so many styles together year after year.. It becomes your own.. All of it. GHALIB's genius.. Har ek baat pe kehte ho, tum ki tu kya hai? Tumhi kaho ke yeh andaaze guftagu kya hai? Jala hai jism jahan dil bhi jal gaya hoga Khuredto ho jo ab raakh justujoo kya hai? Hazaron khwahishen aisi ke har khwahish pe dum nikle Bohot nikle mere armaan lekin fir b...
Kasol Highs I am able to blog on this topic, courtesy Javesh Gaju, my friend from Mauritius who did his master's in Informatics with me in Delhi University. He opened the enchanting world of Kasol to me. Please do not confuse it with Kasuli or Kasuni or any other hill station. Speaking of hill stations, I have not yet mentioned that personally I think that Himachal Pradesh is the best state in India. It cradles the foothills of the Himalayas and stores so many pristine places in its nooks that it will take me a lifetime to unravel them. Kasol is this small village situated by the banks of river Parbati. The closest well known place near it is Manikaran with its famous warm sulphuric springs. For all the rest they go straight to Manali bypassing this village. now for Kasol. It is a Hippie heaven. There are numerous Israelis here during the summer months and they have these amazing matted hair which general cleanliness seeking public loathe. I am still trying to find out a way of hav...
Bain and Boon of being a Palakkad-i And for those who wonder who a Palakkad-i is, well we are people who hail from a village(Palakkad) in the south of the Indian peninsula that lies on the border of Tamil Nadu and Kerala. It was initially owned by the government of Tamil Nadu but now in the hands of Kerala. So my ancestors were Tamil but now we are successfully confused. My friends often ask me which state am I from, and I vacillate between the two. C'mon guys its hard on me. Cut me some slack, I am a Palakkad-i born and brought up in the North which makes it even more eclectic. I grew up speaking a language that perhaps no-one other than a fellow Palakkad-i would understand. I have trouble understanding a perfectly pure Tamil movie or a Malayalam movie, or news readers, or people or songs. I never felt that void up until now when my interaction levels with neighbors from the east and west has increased in magnitude and there is a pressing need to be able to speak one pure language...
Call of the Tribes I have been most mystified by this intangible relationship between Asian lounge music and the hills, vast open spaces. I am consumed by it right now as I listen to Karunesh and watch some of most amazing pics of Tibet, the monks, the prayer flags. It makes me forget my purpose, puts a void in the center of my stomach and makes me want to run looking for that place, that perfect place, with that perfect company of that I don't know of.. Its a Pandora's box for me, it opens many incidents that I may have not witnessed in my life but seem to have lived through them somehow. Its like having traveled through a pipe eons away and reached a perfect place. I cant navigate there myself, it can only be reached perhaps through the will of universe. It will never be as perfect if I try to venture it myself in my complete conscience. I can only be and be taken there as often as I am, vicariously, through music. It would be bliss, like having attained Nirvana. I could give...
~~MAYA~~ Who is she? I often wonder. She is many people in a single moment yet many people are her as well. She could just be a mere figment of my imagination that peeps through my eyes gazing at my world the way she finds fit and manipulates my brain, my heart, my soul. She is a loner yet seeks a presence of her choice. She’s unsettling, demanding, flitting, dreaming, hopeful, lovesick, needy, caring, possessive, giving, empathizing yet not all these and something else, seeking, something beyond her reach, racing her imagination and touching horizons and returning to make me restless and always wanting something more. Her actions are guided by her heart and her heart befuddles her brain, her senses. She desires a million things all at once. Like someone aptly put to describe her; her life is full of test tubes with a ratio of love from those she seeks and things she wants and some others are empty for the things she would fill in later as and when she discovers them to be an inevitabl...
Paint a Patch Party!! Best part about painting walls - You get the choose the color, texture and pattern of the most bizzare idea in your head and see it materialize slowly! - You feel you are in control of every stroke, every sloppy patch - Or you could just get dead drunk and see a creamy white wall being hidden by your brush strokes guided by the workings of a disjoint yet cohesive mind! - You get the privilege to skip a bath and look as ugly and colorful as you can inspite of it not being holi! - Your adrenaline rush climaxes when those tapes come off the wall - You could spend hours gazing at the slight contours, pondering over your mistakes, thinking of improvisations and dreaming of how to make it even more gorgeous - Have loads of visitors to come and appreciate your nest!
The Tall and the Mighty Calling! This has by far been the most compulsive topic that I wanted to blog about and somehow I have been procrastinating it. Rather I have been waiting for that one high after which I would be thrown into writing about hikes. I know a lot of us have that as a usual hobby. Almost every other Desi soul on orkut has hiking as his interest. I may be in the same pool coz I don’t know their exact frame of mind when they hike. But for me its an elixir. I developed this ardent love for the hills somewhere in my adolescence. Since then I long to run to them. Mountain View offered me ample scope to quench my appetite. The copious trials have their own flavor and my friends and I pick one every week. My last cake was Half dome in Yosemite National Park . We had been there earlier in May 2006 to conquer it, hardly having trained for it. We almost made it.. ALMOST and that hit us bad coz it stood there high up mocking at those who thought it was undemand...
My new MINI I cant quite describe the feeling of owning something you've wanted for so long. But I am in those moments right now. After so many speculations and misgivings, I finally drove home my dream car. But just a day before that I felt like I was in the wrong side of the higway with everything charging at me for the decision I made, for instance: Why not a car that is the most common, most practical and most affordable? Nuances like loans and retail values and brands hounded me. Thanks to that I feel I have achieved supreme knowledge in number details like interest rates, milage and moolah ;) But then again, this is the quintessential question for picking between surviving now/saving later and living.. Do I want to live the way I planned or do I want to walk the line. I opt for the former any day, hence the choice :)
Intervewing Paranoia I would always tell my friends that each one of us should have one job waiting for us after we graduate from school, than have to go back to studying things all over again and then end up with jobs that we do not enjoy as much. This way what we reap is truly what we sow and its not a week's cramming and gulping down of the PIEs and other quick tricks and tips to crack it.. It may be a non sensical thought but how much sense does being judged by anyone for a hour to decide if you are fit for job or not make anyways? And what if its not your best day, or its not the interviwer's favourite day? What is the criteria that makes it click or blow in your face? And what are the odds against a suitable undertaking that fits your interests as well as your potential. But yet again, the question is, how does one zero down to that? The other problem that exists is hope against hope. The fact that knowing an interview did not go as well, we are dejected when the mail h...
CARNATIC BLUES!! I believe most people especially in the US have their primary goal to just be able to perform on stage. Back in India, it is not so. I feel for Carnatic music, one should go through rigorous training even after you feel that you have reached a stage where you can be giving a stage performance. The whole structure of raaga needs to be very clear in your head and the more you advance in your learning, the more you should go back to the basics and use them for all the raagas that you learn. Like for examples, the alankaras should be practiced with all the raagas and not just mayamamavagaula. Also, varnams should be really stressed upon before reaching the keertana stage. The more varnams you learn, the more strong you become in the ragaa structure. For keertanams, you should stress on learning the madhayama kalam keeatanam first for any raaga, then moving on to one having a chittaswarm and then moving on to vilambakalam keertanam for the same raaga. This way y...
I would often wonder why is it that people hinge on to prayers before starting something new or carrying pictures of gods in their purses for an interview or scribble "om" or "nam myoho renge kyo" in their answer sheets as soon as they are distributed.. And where does this vigor go once the inertia or the novelty of that event is broken and a steady pace is set in. What is the psyche behind this? I am a practicing Buddhist and we chant as a form of our practice, for hours together sometimes. We determine to make a change in our surroundings and summoning the strength to make something happen for us and others as well. The meaning that I derive out of this whole practice is the law of "cause and effect". What we do is what we get or what goes around comes around. I ask in my head sometimes, if the thing that comes around is really an effect of the causes that we made or is it to stop us from making bad causes pro actively. Is it magic or is it common sense?...