In the past few hours, I have done what I perhaps do the best. I’ve been myself. I’ve done what I do the best. It’s rare that I get such intense bouts of umed to blog my heart out over intense topics, but tonight is that night. I expect words to just flow out of me, to the tune of Beethoven. So here I go!
I’ve done many things today. I’m confused whether to captivate your attention by mentioning all of them, or to unveil them as I go on. I think I’d prefer the later, for I’d like my day to be as surprizing to you as it was to me! Let me start off with a bang. A weird one.
I ‘discovered’ a cousin of mine. Yeah, you got that right. And yes, I can explain it by saying that I am an introvert and that I don’t like to socialise and stuff. But over the years, if there is one thing that I have learnt is that excuses are for sore losers. So, if not for anything else, I’d better not give any for the fear of being a looser, a lame one that too. I don’t like talking to people, and that’s it. I prefer to stick to my people, apparently for reason! But today, I found out the answer why I find a lack of intellectual people in this world. It’s just because I don’t want to find! It’s partly because of my shyness to say, open up a conversation or so. But I just can’t relate it to my enthusiasm to do so once I know a person really well!
She is a year younger than me, but makes much more sense. I remember seeing her loads of times for family functions and stuff, and you may call me ignorant, but I didn’t bother to remember her name too. Yes, I can again brush it off saying that I have a bad memory but truth be told, I am feeling a little guilty of not making an attempt. Yeah, like in today’s world, it all beings with a Facebook friendship request (Alas, It’s the much touted day today wherein mobile companies charge you more for texts and people make money by selling 'friendship bands’). I wondered for a while, what to do with the request, but something told me that it was a familiar face out there. A little investigation with my mother told me that yes, she was my cousin. “Oh” I said nonchalantly, and clicked on the accept button. I was accepting my stupidity more than the friend request. But wait, that is not the discovery I was talking about. A discovery is meant to be much more deep than a find, and so it was. It’s pointless to divulged into the details of what we talked about, but to sum it up, it was a very intense questioning session, an intellectual storm which rather felt as if I have been debating with her since time immortal! Realization strikes all, albeit a little late for some. But what matters is that it does! She writes poetry, plays the guitar just as I do! What I learnt today is that life is short, and we should not always rely upon the other person to initiate the discussion. And you should never gues
s about what a person will be, it’s not a true or false question that we are dealing with over humans, but it is humans instead. Unpredictable creatures, they will either stun or surprize! Prejudice sucks. I have faced the brunt of it, so has a friend of mine. We both know how baseless and hollow it is. If you do not have experiences with people, you naturally will be scared and shy to interact. It’s a vicious cycle, beware!My cousin turned out to be one of the handful people that I was very much comfortable talking and philosophizing with. Blame my socializing ‘prowess’, or accept that it’s the truth but it is hard to find people who talk something more than the marks that they wanted to score or the latest trend in town. Nothing wrong in that, but I find it deeply unsatisfying to talk about material things. Every person has different needs and capacities, agreed. But I’m just stating a point here. I find a lack of people who can pose questions and work out their answers for contentment and deep satisfaction. I don’t need you to be a poet to communicate to me, a photo or a work of art can do the same. A piece of music can do the same job. They take you on a journey to discover your own self. And that’s where the tabla comes into the picture!
I’ve always wanted to post on my connection with music, I didn’t do much justice to it with the monsoon playlist, but here is a better attempt. I’m a guy who is a fan of western music, international music sometimes, as I belong to the class of people who think that language is no barrier to the tunes that we connect with. Music is truly universal! But my interest in jazz, operas and instrumental along with genres like antifolk and alternative have tuned me off from the pop, rap and hip-hop that prevailed over everything a few years ago. But slowly, it did lead to the decline of my inclination towards Indian classical music, I had this prejudice. But just a few hours ago, my school-mate linked me a video of his, wherein he was playing the tabla with a sitar maestro. I was really eager to watch it, as I had heard that he played the tabla really well. But I leave it upto you to decide how amazing he is, after watching this video.
Ram Bhakta, my friend playing the table
Within a few seconds, I was overwhelmed by the power, the potency of the music I was listening to. I was mesmerized, to say the least. I drifted away into a state of bliss. Although it was not Bismillah Khan’s Shehnai, it was magic to me. Maybe or may not be for you. I went back to the chat and being a learner of the guitar, and knowing how tough it is, I complimented him like a good audience would.
But there was a much deeper lesson to be learnt from what I had just witnessed. I had linked him to a hair-raising piece of opera by Luciano Pavarotti, and he too appreciated it. We joked about how much of the Italian we understood, and then I again complimented him on his performance. As humble as he was to me, accepting that he was a nobody, we both agreed upon the fact that it was the need to improvise that kept us going stronger and stronger in our respective fields. That this was the simple but truth, the secret to a successful life! Ram said that he never faced any problem in learning the instrument, as he loved to do it! In fact, answers came to him naturally! Everyone has a niche for themselves in this world. It’s just that we have to struggle to discover and sharpen it. I’m talking stuff that we all know about but we hardly practise. We think it is tough. But here is a song, which was originally sung by Miley Cyrus. It suits the topic I’m posting on, plus the girl’s raw emotions make it worth watching!
Sometimes, people ask me how much hours I study or what tips I can give to them to score good marks in examination. I start wondering whether they have learnt anything at all from 3-Idiots, the movie. I firmly believe that our passion decides the greatness we can achieve. Agreed, that there is no success without hard-work and talent combined, but when one has the passion, one doesn’t feel that he/she is working hard. It’s like powering your boosters in space, you are in cruise mode! It doesn’t matter what we become or do. It is the sincerity, dedication and love that matters. Or as the saying goes, Success follows the pursuit for excellence! To sum it up, I make use the lyrics of the very same song!
There's always gonna be another mountain
I'm always gonna wanna make it move
Always gonna be a uphill battle
Sometimes I'm gonna have to lose
Ain't about how fast I get there
Ain't about what's waiting on the other side
It's the climb!!
And yeah, this leads me to the final part. My love, my passion taught me a small, but valuable lesson in life. It concerns a simple blade. I’m keeping the technical stuff aside for another post, you can skip to the last two paragraphs if you want to, or read on! In the recent past, especially in my XIIth std, I’ve taken a liking towards trying to apply or perform everything that I learn during the theory classes. And like every other guy (or am I alone?) I’m fascinated by light and it’s dual nature. We learnt that light sometimes behaves as a wave and sometimes like a particle. To prove the wave-nature of light, we take the help of that property of waves known as interference. And at the time I learnt it, it looked as if this is the stuff that you can cook up, or see for yourself only in a lab. But, spending two days in Poinginim (mum’s place) and trying to utilize every thing that I saw with the help of my cousin brother who had returned from the U.S.A.,lead me to the internet where I saw a way of checking out the wave nature of light using only a glass slide, some candle soot, a blade and a LASER.
Coming back to Panaji, I swung into action and within a day I got the experiment done, although I
had to contact every person I knew for a LASER. I was not overwhelmed at the results I got, but yes, I did get what I wanted. But somehow I was not satisfied. In the evening, I went to the observatory, my second home on this planet and was guided by Videsh Khandeparkar and Rakesh Rao to do the best I could with the apparatus I had. But after a while I was pleasantly shocked. Using only a deformed blade and a laser, I had one of the most thrilling sights of my life in front of me! There was a diffraction pattern as beautiful as I saw in the books! Now you might ask me what’s so great in that! But what I feel is that beauty lies in simplicity. It’s not complicating things things that is fun, but simplifying things that is! What I had thought of as an experiment that I would just dream about as this juncture was done with the minimal amount of time and equipment! And now I’m sure that I’ll never forget the working of diffraction because I actually produced one, and I got pleasure in doing so. The stuff that we learn is not just to be locked up and forgotten. It’s meant to be applied in every sense we can! Funnily, I can find similarities between nature’s laws and human behaviour. Yeah, as I said, I am pretty much crazy!
So if anyone asks you what one can learn in a day, tell them to speak to me! It took me around 3 hours to put this down, and I guess it is a pretty long post. If you made it through all of the stuff that I could cook up, then you do deserve a good dose of laughter, and I guess this song will just do that. It’s sung by the same girl as above, but thanks to the nonsensical lyrics, it is even worse than the disaster called ‘Friday’!! Do check it out! Don’t blame me if you faint!
Life Rocks.
Mid@$Touch
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