Digging for Meaning

Right now my whole being feels like a pastiche of a million poetries. thoughts have melted into curving, dripping, flowing ideas. i close my eyes and it feels like i am dancing.. moving with the breeze... waltzing with dry leaves. levitated. light. i am listening to Il postino's soundtrack which has neruda's poetry. and its making me yearn to read some kundera all over again. maybe, i will read laughable loves once more. its worth it at any rate. sleep, i have found a substitute for you. good night.

life escapes if you run after it. our destiny is nothing but to wait. a lesson fell through after having lived a quarter century worth of life. a quarter century. feels like a lot, when u say that. but doesn't really when i ask myself. a quarter century spent without any respect or regard to act of waiting. always, kicked it out of the way. or if the wait became far too imposing to avoid, i would recede back into a cocoon made of some other time and space. but even escapes become boring. waiting caught up with me. there is no escaping it. i await. i think, god is a waiter after all. he waits upon us to serve us life lessons. he waits until we appreciate the act of waiting. he holds our life until we calm down from our frenzy. and then hands the reins back to us when we can handle it, that is when the mirage of control is lifted and calm consumes you. i now understand, so to say, why have i had this desire to work as a waiter since quite a few years. it was freedom i thought earlier

recipe for a saturday night. 7 -8 replays of 'adagio for strings' by samuel barber. 2-3 replays of 'moonlight adagio' by beethoven. 1-2 replays of 'gloomy sunday' by rezso seress'. + reading binge of pablo neruda's love sonnets or Baudelaire's 'Flowers of evil' + port wine. (completely optional. might even be redundant). ____ its like a high. i better not get addicted to this.

just heard samuel barber's 'adagio for strings '. and put it on loop. i had heard it earlier, maybe as OST of some movie or generally in my playlist at shuffle. but today it made me pause and listen to it alone. its so bloody beautiful! it flies. leave me alone.. let me dissolve in these sounds.. as it flies over cities, times, people; let me too experience the colors of the world mixing in a rain. the true fresh colors left after the rain cleared the greys and false shiny ones. The adagio is like the first rays of the sun... going around the world... liberating it from darkness. 'adagio for strings' is the smell of wet soil. it is open spaces. it is so universal. it has that sublime quality of beethoven's 'moonlight adagio'. funny, because barber was more a brahms and bach guy. its one of those pieces with strenght in them.. strength to lift a soul up by the sheer beauty of music. you want to submit to it at times of hardship knowing that it resurrect

Perhaps, the single most important force that shaped my life is my impatience and greed for newness. i loved playing synthesizer. i joined classes to learn it when i was in 5th standard. the day I learnt 'papa kehte hai' i was riding my bicycle wildly with joy and hands in the air. no handlebars. triumph. I saw triumph in the fact that quickly i was able to find melodies of any song on keyboards within minutes. then the quest became to play faster songs. then it went to learn classical notations and ragas. (i never paused then to master my fingers, to control, to hold, to pause, to get that exact timing. i was much too impatient.) and that was my undoing. I saw this vast reserve of yet unknown music. the book of notations that my teacher had, was quite expensive. and i wanted all of the notation sheets in it. so i set about writing those notations in my notebook. that took away a month or so. and then my teacher didnt have to teach me, so she kept on supplying me with notation

just saw this ted talk about photography . Edward Burtynsky took photographs depicting oil's expansive role in our societal regression. few things to be noted here. exhibition.. he chose large scale format. medium as imposing and striking as the content. content.. the right politics. content/idea comes first. photograph/execution/medium comes later. so often than not, this is what happens. with digital photography, you take gazillion pics and then decide later on, while photoshopping it, what should the pic mean. its appalling as it has crept into professional and serious art photography too. a good photographer manages to restrict the meaning of what he wants to say, while he is bloody clicking the pic. though, one may get away with 'artistic expressions' and altered motives somewhere else... but that somewhere else has become ubiquitous and concrete motives have gone into margins. well, i am culprit of 'lending meaning' to existing frame as well. ya well, hazards

just saw this talk on TED. Its the usual evangelical white man's talk to other white men about the need for understanding a people as a people rather than a 'problem' or a 'situation'. its about the 'shadow city' as he calls the slums in developing world. its an interesting talk and an earnest attempt in the right direction. However, in their politics to humanize, they tend to absolve the other forces at work. earlier in his talk, he talks how these shadow cities are expanding and more and more people are trooping in, without questioning why is that the case. he talks of how the shadow cities lack basic amenities of life but all these cities are built on hope and freedom. true, but what is making the people uproot themselves culturally, socially, materially and move to inhuman filth-holes in hope of what? while everyone should be able to enjoy his rights, at the same time he need not be elsewhere, far from his home to enjoy those rights and freedom. compou

Werner Herzog. i see his work and unfailingly its such an inspiration. firstly, he is a student of life. the way the camera stays, moves and even the way narrative is constructed, its as it were his humble attempt at understanding and empathising with a people rather than simply capturing and sensationalizing a certain emotion; like most others do. Without trying to compare myself to him - i am too small a cretin, yet, to do that - i would like to share an experience i had while watching his movie. a particular scene in his movie 'wheel of time' was so similar to one i had shot in mumbai of three children sitting by road. it was eery. and uplifting at the same time. i was touched :P and he goes around the world and stares at people with open eyes and asks questions! his movie have been based in peru , antarctic , india, tibet, australia , africa .. ! and whats more, his politics is at the right place. his questions are humane. maybe its aborigines' struggle for recogniti

after a long long time, i spent a whole day at home. fragmented thoughts... letting them be. to do list, letting it be. well, truth be told, the day was spent in hope and plan of spending it elsewhere too.. but that hope and plan existed in that uncertain plain which you know is only an illusion, a dim possibility, and that uncertainty is what gives our existence that vibrating energy. u keep on attempting to change course of time, but someone else has already shaped it in concrete for you. time. time is like water, i said.. it ever flows. some one said 'bull shit' to this. then i said.. 'time is bullshit, ever present and infinite'. :P and then we missed ek chaalis ki last local. that was yesterday's time. today's time was moody and stuck to my skin a tad too intimately. it stretched with my yawns, it lingered on my open eyes staring with me the ceiling and the spider web in corner. and when i wished my time to be somewhere else, it simply deserted me... i w

every day, an hour before sleep is due ego deserts me. and i am left lying on the bed curled up with unsure thumbs and fingers twiddling with the cellphone. the day after, ego wakes up with cocky erasure of memory of ever having felt needy. ego! you beast! you deserter! stay true or let alone. what good is an undulating pride. what good is an undulating faith.

tea. 1. sitting in cafe desert rain, sipping on that apricot tea on a lovely afternoon. with the spoon i swerve the warm concoction. the little apricot pieces play waltz with tea leaves in it. its cold, but sun's rays stream in through the wide open windows. there's a bunch of local kids sitting around, being cool, chilling. some one is playing a guitar. i am 'mainland' indian, so not many people are interested in me. But my companion is french, so she receives warm smiles. She is eating her favourite cookie. i must admit, its quite something. But I prefer sipping on some more varieties of teas before devouring those cookies. Someone just came in having trekked the stok-kangri. we shake hands and swap stories. we laugh at our different accents - german, marathi, english, french - and ensuing miscommunication. 2. A 12 km stretch to a remote village in ladakh wasn't really a road. but no one told us. with the trusty pulsar, we trudged on steep slopes, dangerous