Digging for Meaning

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 ...

are they inter-dependent? by sanitisation, for the argument here, i mean actual physical cleanliness, though the metaphorical equivalent will hold just as good. sanitisation essentially reduces the input to our senses. smells suffers the most. i have written about it somewhere in this blog.. essentially, we are sanitizing smells the most, while polluting sight with proliferation of glowing rectangles (TV, laptop, computer). also, suffering is the sense of touch with touch getting eroticised and societally frowned upon. and well, memories are made of our experiences with our senses. here too, visual memory is so prevalent with photographs and videos and what not. when arundhati roy reminisces about the smell of steel railings in a bus on the conductor's hand in her book 'god of small things', it came as such a fresh insight to me, i was bowled over by the genius of the writer. with the western onslaught, why has india managed its survival of its societal memories, whereas th...

its amazing the way the forests absorb sounds and voices and turn it into a part of itself. so a shout, a shriek, a murmur doesnt remain a shout, a shriek, a murmur but is transformed into a caress, a shiver, a touch of the winds off the palm of the leaves. (hm.. too many ofs.. cant help it.) Once inside a forest, it takes in everything and sets the rules. what it takes in has its edges chopped off, and turned into something fluid and movable. directions become suspect. light breaks and falls in diffused surrender. sounds coalesce and loose their rasp and bounce and slip deeper within our heads. they don't just bounce off your ears, but they travel within and linger and become a part of a symphony which the woods is playing. oh the sweet symphony. what would i give to be able to listen to it whenever i want! The prelude is usually a chirpy welcome song which subsequently gives way to a lingering adagio. The longer you stay, the more moods of forests are revealed to you. i have expe...

With CultUth (a club we had started 3-4 yrs back), we had hoped to do some experiments and stuff that needn't really have defined outcomes. We never got around to do them, I thought I should share those ideas, maybe someone interested in doing them could get in touch with me to do them, or do them themselves and share the experience. I share the first idea that we had thought of in this post.... 1. A group of people going to an alien city for 3-4 days. all blind folded except for one who would be the guide. The rest would be blind for all practical purposes, throughout day n night. The group can't stay indoors for more than 18 hours a day. They have to roam around and experience the place, sans the vision. What it means to be blind? How does a blind person live? How does he feel? ofcourse 3 days aren't much, but any more than that and we won't have volunteers. :P Also, In today's time where vision is becoming the preferred sense, and other senses such as taste and s...

While walking over the overbridge over the train tracks, I saw the rail tracks glistening with the light of yellow signal. The yellow long lines dividing the dark into equal twos, textured and raw, with the smell of metal and sweat of urban nation. The east side dark ended with jagged edges of station roof - the undulating continuity of shades of gray and grime. the west side dark went on only until the pillar standing in between me and it. Then a bird came and sat over the signal. Almost in dark. The light from signal of no consequence to it (apart from possible heat of the metal on its feet). Still its black eyes managed to shine a dark shine against its black body. I so wanted to capture the moment into a photograph framed thus - the focus on the bird pirched on signal. though the tracks visible just as well, and so is the dark. essentially, to capture the whole experience of being there, but I couldn't do it. U have to have a central focus in a pic to give meaning to it. Thats ...

This post started as a response to a comment made by a friend to the earlier post. But my thought took me a little further than they should have, so am posting the ramblings here as a post. well, the earlier post alludes to something grander and something that runs through many of my earlier posts and has consonance with what you said. reality is something that one constructs about oneself. reality isn't an absolute. Mahatma Gandhi's quote 'to your own truth, to your wisdom, thats where u must go', has stuck with me like anything, and lends itself to the notion of reality and here it ties up with the question of vision. Our 'truth', our 'wisdom' is constrained in the frame of our vision. I celebrate that increment in conscience with increased field of vision in the earlier post. Secondly, the thought was inspired from an observation when looking. The vision of man. if I am to talk in terms of photography, Ayn Rand's 'man' would be picturised ...

It all started with emoticons. the simple one's - :P, ;) the anime one's - (0_0) , (u_u), (^-^)b... then avatars in chat. Secondlife took it to a whole other level, where an alternate reality is constructed. It is an internet based virtual world launched in 2003, developed by Linden Research, Inc . A downloadable client program called the Second Life Viewer enables its users, called "Residents", to interact with each other through motional avatars, providing an advanced level of a social network service combined with general aspects of a metaverse. Residents can explore, meet other Residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, and create and trade items (virtual property) and services with one another. (source - wikipedia article) well, the real thing of consequence about second life is that, that it has a virtual currency - Linden Dollar (Linden, or L$) and is exchangeable for real world currencies in a resident to resident marketplace fac...

When I was much younger, I would sit plumb in front of TV for hours on end. I used to do my homework, sheepishly looking towards TV in skew or hooded eyes, trying to fool parents in believing me that i was indeed studying, and i just 'needed' to 'listen' to TV. Looking back now, i feel that might be the reason behind my habitual forward tilted low gaze. Whenever i realised my posture, i would correct it with upward tilt of my head. A few days back, I realised something beautiful. Upon that habitual realisation and subsequent jerk of my face upwards, I noticed the difference between the world that one sees. When one looks with low eyes the object of ur gaze is at the top half of your vision. The thought is restricted with the 'purpose' of gaze. Besides the colors that usually pervade for this pose are dark and mundane - concrete, road, furniture, people.... There's a sense of being constrained. No escape from the trivial, the mundane. The sea of mediocrity ...

Digital Natives (DNs) like their information served in 'multimedia' and not just one medium (like the ever so abundant text) and Yahoo knows it. Yahoo has come up with a new spruced up search interface called 'glue'. Glue essentially changes the way one uses the search utility, eliminating the need for a few clicks in certain instances, all the while making the result page much more interesting with videos, images, Y! answers, maps, news and any other relevant sources and multimedia being made available on the result page. The service hasn't been rolled out across geographies and queries yet though. As of now, it is only a Y! India feature with only a few categories of searches (sports, travel, entertainment, health, stocks, and tech). for eg. I wanted to know about good beaches in Konkan (where I plan to spend this weekend :D) and searched for 'konkan' and the result page threw up wikipedia's entry about konkan, news, y! answers, images along with the...