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...