Digging for Meaning

i am a big fan of fresh starts. why? cuz they are fresh, and as with things fresh, they smell nice and juicy.. full of ready-to-ripe promises. start cuz thats the best part of every experience. the attack of a note, the foreplay, the buzz of a conversation... starts define. starts command. why to follow up when starts have all the magic and the rest is only tragic hope and hopeless maintenance? no seriously, why? apart from some abstract certainty it gives us nothing. in turn it erases so many possibilities. worse, it erases even the buzz that stings pleasurably at the mere sight of a possibility on horizon. in exchange for certainty, it plants in our heads and hearts the insects of forever-n-ever doubt. doubt of things past, doubt of things could-have-beens, doubts of future. is it grace in present or is it simply dying a slow uneventful death? hmm... maybe certainty is that valuable. maybe. but until i get tired and my bones get rickety and my eyes stop gouging out with my mou...

hope. faith. submission. uncertainty. bankruptcy. bitterness. disillusionment. no lessons learnt. another fresh start. hope. faith... and again and again and again..

earlier i would never listen to songs on loop. i constantly needed to listen newer and newer stuff. sara tavarez, illapu, Bonobo... give me more, give me more! the thirst for excellence once discovered, is inextinguishable. the genius i was hearing to was evidence of other geniuses out there. its a never ending quest for sublime. the beauty is indefinite and never ending in many shapes and sounds. but then grace sets in with some songs. songs that mean something to you. Songs anchor our lives to certain moments in our lives. within the first note of that song it yanks us through our throats to that time. there's no point in fighting it, its part of you now. instead, swim in it, until it lasts. whatever the memory be, its always delicious. its ok to be a bit masochistic, go ahead suck on that pain. if it weren't delicious, you wouldn't have been remembering it. long live continuous loops.

pornography makes the beauty of a being less accessible by stealing and copy-pasting the flesh without the soul, everywhere. By bringing private to public it numbs public for the private. Photo manipulation is the pornography of photography. By numbing people with altered images, its reducing our ability to appreciate a photo for what it is.. its choice of content and way its framed. Though considerable skill and perhaps art goes into turning the image into a smacking shining clone of itself, it is educating us to reject reality in favor of an imagined one.

1. on the way from prithvi theatre to home in an autorickshaw, we stopped at a place for a moment to buy some ice-cream. the place had families and kids thronging the area. A group of men -seemingly upper middle class young office goers - passed by, cursing jovially. The autowallah guy got furious. He started saying, 'ye bolteh hain toh ganda nahin hain. garib koi gaali de toh pakad ke peetenge, bolenge kaha se aa gaya gandagi karne..' (If they curse then its not bad, is it? if a poor man would have cursed in public, he would have been beaten up and scolded saying that where have you come from to spread the filth.) 2.* a cabbie had this to say about the recent case where a drunk woman mowed down a few people under her car. "Hindustan ka niyam toh ameeron ke liye nahin hai.. jab tak mamla garam hai, andar rahenge, fir bahar nikal aayenge. 4 logo pe gaadi chadane ke baad bhi salman khan ab ghum raha hai nanga. darna bas hum logonko chahiye." *Source: Gaurav ...