The Dangling Conversation

“What time is it?”

“Quarter to one.”

“Quarter to one! It’s taken almost half an hour to cross GK.”

“Yeah, it does take quite a lot of time.”

“I asked a rickshaw to take me to the main road, he asked for twenty rupees.”

“Twenty? Should have been, maybe, fifteen.”

“That’s what I think. The guy must have thought I’m some new-comer who wouldn’t know if he overcharges me. Hah.”

“I know that’s what they do.”

“I’d rather walk when I can. People don’t walk enough, anyway.”

“Where’d you ask the rickshaw?”

“Right near the market back there.”

“Oh, from there. Then it should have been even less than fifteen.”

“I know. Ten rupees would have been fair. In any case it is good to walk. People just don’t walk anymore. They sit in their air-conditioned cars and move around.”

“Yes, that’s true. I have been walking for about the last hour, or so.”

“Is it something to do with your job?”

“No I had to pay the water bill. I thought I’ll walk for it.”

“That’s very good. That’s what one should do. I myself like to walk about two or three kilometers every morning. It’s good for one’s health, keeps the body fit. Otherwise people fall to some many diseases nowadays. The body needs to be exercised.”

“People don’t even breathe in fresh air anymore.”

“Yes, that too they don’t.”

“I used to walk back when I was in college. But ever since I started working, I have been in offices and haven’t been active as I used to be.”

“Are you married, or unmarried?”

“… Unmarried.”
“Oh then you need to work harder to regain your fitness. Normally someone would have your structure after they are married. You need to work more for your stomach.”

“Well, yes, I’m trying. Well I have to go this way. See you.”

“Okay, bye.”

Can't help falling in love ...

I must apologise beforehand for the extreme and unabashed self-indulgence that will follow.

I am in love.

With what, I cannot really say.

I just know that I have heard my heart thumping to a beautiful tune, a tango is the accurate name.

Please try it.

To elucidate, I have been recently (about 15 minutes ago) been reminded of a timeless movie sequence from a timeless movie featuring a great actor and an equally great song. It is the tango dance sequence form ‘Scent of a Woman’.

Please indulge me by indulging in this music. It is a musical piece based on a song from a 1930’s Argentinean movie called ‘Por Una Cabreza’, which as I understand is Spanish for ‘For (the head) of a horse’. Strangely morbid for such a fine piece, but it actually refers to a gambler’s comparison of love to the feeling of seeing a horse win a race (by a head). But that is just detail.

The real life-changing moment is in the movie where a blind man, played by Al Pacino (I could kiss the ground he walks on) who is performing some desires he has in life and deciding to set the count straight as far as having lived his life as he had foreseen it. I don’t know about him or anyone else, but every time I view this song I have this urge to sway out of the film reel of my life and onto some wheatish landscape by Van Gogh and just have this music on loop narrating my life in ways that I am sure the cypresses will approve of.

The violin tell me of the main events, while the cellos tell me of sudden moments when life changes track, but never for the worse. It is a throbbing note where the blood pulsing is felt within as the high note catches me like a gust of wind just beneath my ears and carries me off to a heaven where this music is the God.

You won’t know what I mean unless you see/hear it for yourself. I am sure that you all will be thinking of me as a deranged, off centre person, but I think Pacino's character in the movie feels the same way, and Pacino the actor must agree with me.

For the sequence in the movie,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBHhSVJ_S6A

"The Dead"

It is part of my ongoing attempt to try and educate myself on literature by trying to assimilate how the great masters (or thus canonised by the reading audience at large) went about their craft. It often feels like cheating, for I canot imagine any of them trying this nut-and-bolts approach, yet at the same time it cannot be all that bad, for artists study great artists, and dancers learn from great dancers, so why not also with writing.

One of the people I am trying to learn from is James Joyce, proably the most clichéd writer to try and emulate. But my preoccupation is with people who break the mould and go at right angles to the stream of creativity thus far. Each writer of note has some great breakaway that makes him or her memorable, while others remain mere bestsellers (guffaw).

I am trying to read his collection of short stories ‘Dubliners’ and just read what is said to be the best piece of them all – ‘The Dead’.

It was not all that I hoped it would be. It didn’t leave me breathless, rather it left me wanting less. I thought it was tedious, and following the way of Henrik Ibsen and his mode of employing brutal clashes between close ones, but not as well-paced or enwrapping. But that’s just me, and I am sure I am in a minority.

But I was moved bythe last sequence between Gabrielle and Gretta, husband and wife, and the story of Gretta’s past. That was worthy of Ibsen. But what I want to share with you is not a synopsis or reading of the story, but just one passage that is worthy of fame. It is a passage that shows the principal character’s slipping into recollection and then into conjuration, which I feel is a masterly representation of the way our thoughts oten link into each other, without the slightest direction. And it also brings out how truly ‘the dead’ or ‘death’ impinges on our thoughts and how morbidly fascinating such notions become.

“Perhaps she had not told him all the story. His eyes moved to the chair over which she had thrown some of her clothes. A petticoat string dangled to the floor. One boot stood upright, its limp upper fallen down: the fellow of it lay upon its side. He wondered at his riot of emotions of an hour before. From what had it proceeded? From his aunt's supper, from his own foolish speech, from the wine and dancing, the merry-making when saying good- night in the hall, the pleasure of the walk along the river in the snow. Poor Aunt Julia! She, too, would soon be a shade with the shade of Patrick Morkan and his horse. He had caught that haggard look upon her face for a moment when she was singing Arrayed for the Bridal. Soon, perhaps, he would be sitting in that same drawing-room, dressed in black, his silk hat on his knees. The blinds would be drawn down and Aunt Kate would be sitting beside him, crying and blowing her nose and telling him how Julia had died. He would cast about in his mind for some words that might console her, and would find only lame and useless ones. Yes, yes: that would happen very soon.”

If there is one passage that embodies the highest achievement of the modernist and of the bare, unleashed power of the written word, it is this.

Steppin' Out

What do you do if you realise you’re 24 and haven’t taken more than baby steps yet?

I mean, we all know that one must crawl before we walk, and walk before we run, but is it ever too late to go through the stages, and instead want to just start running? Or maybe some people are just different and feel what they need is to push themselves off a branch and learn to fly that-a-way?

For the longest time I have known that like to write. But I have never been one to keep myself at something. Eventually what you felt was a God-given gift turns out to be a good start that we wasted by not keeping pace. I think this lesson has to come to everyone someday, and usually those with less of the inherent talent outdo those who are comfortably privileged. They just start working harder from much earlier.

The worst thing about me is that I have a clear, undoubted vision of my failings and my abilities, and my failing at my abilities, and yet I am sitting put in my nest of scattered tidbits and contented by the shiny thing here and the colourful piece there and feel that life is beautiful from where I sit, so why make the long walk and the hard jump and the strenuous flight?

Why indeed?

I have acquired a book (oh, when will I stop?) that has an interesting title – ‘The Consolation of Philosophy’. The consolation isn’t as important as the philosophy. We need the philosophy as then we start interpreting our lives. I don’t mean being Socratic or a Nietzscheian , as it is obvious that neither was Socrates a Socratic, nor was Nietzsche a Nietzscheian. But instead we need to know what it is we want to be and what we want our lives to demonstrate. You want to be a musician, but an Indian or a Western, or something that lies between, and that too a modern musician or a classical, and will you be a traditional musician or a fusion of past-present, east-west? And when you have the answer then try and expand your sphere of experiences to make yourself a specialist. Not the best in the world, but one who understands their subject inside out. If you want to be a literature student, then be the best in one period, or one movement. The idea is not to limit your view, but to be assured of at least one view. I have often been convinced of something only to have another say something that puts it on its head. Be evolved enough in your life to account for everything and to keep modifying your thoughts to encompass you experiences.

See I’m rambling, and that is probably because when I sat down I didn’t know what my end result should be. That’s my problem, but one that I don’t know how to surmount. Often when I write I feel result is inferior if I have the end in sight, it becomes manipulative and obvious, but if I don’t know what I will end with, it is a more balanced progress. But then I end up rambling over and over.

Damn.

The Murals of India

Murals are to the fine arts, what drums are to the musical arts – man’s first instinctive way of creating in that form. A mural is a drawing on a wall, not like graffiti with spray paint, but with natural colours on a cave and then on houses and temples. Similarly, percussion was born out of man’s first tendency to create a sound by banging on a surface. Interestingly both of these can been seen as our natural response to boredom (essentially time when we have nothing else to create/do) as we tap away on the arm of a chair or doodle on a piece of paper.

Drums have always been my pet interest, but I recently learnt about murals, specifically murals of India. It was a lecture that I attended, by a scholar who has been studying Indian art (not modern) and among his favourite areas of interest are the murals to be found in temples of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Jammu & Kashmir, primarily. Benoy K Behl, his name, and his presentation of photographs of these murals was truly increadible.

The murals depict centuries of beautiful paintings without any authorship, without ego and without agitation. To explain the three, they are not attributed to any particular painters, and are more of a communal school of thought and expression, they don’t depict kings resplendent in their finery but stories of pious acts, and the murals are replete with expressions of gentleness and peacefulness as they point to the divinity of their subjects. It has been said by a few that these are the best examples of human achievements in art, hyperbolic but hopeful. Indeed, a thought to depict the beautiful and delicate feelings like calm, vast oceans is a divine form of art. They celebrate all things material but without attachment, and they celebrate all things spiritual but without detachment.

I cannot express this thought more accurately as I have just begun to explore this subject. But I hope to be drawn deeper and deeper into it and uncover masterpieces without names.