Of live music!

It's strange how a  song from a distant day can trigger a flood of memories. While shuffling songs on the player today morning, I heard the familiar beats of Tu Aashiqui Hai and was transported back to the year 2008. My second year of graduation. AIIMS annual fest. We were there for the finals of the India Quiz, waiting in the last rows of the auditorium. It must have been 7 in the evening. A music competition was being conducted on stage and I wasn't paying attention. But more than anything that day I remember the performance of a college band who played 'Tu Aashiqui Hai'. It wasn't the era of mobile recordings but till my last breath I will remember their rendition. I do not even remember if they won but it was the beginning of a lifelong romance for live music. I hadn't heard the original but when I did, it did not even remotely capture the magic of that performance, that evening.

What is it with certain notes at certain times that, that moment remains frozen forever. Sometimes I feel as if there is music for our ears and then there is music for our souls. The latter is the kind which strikes a chord deep inside and nourishes from within. I do not as much remember the songs I play everyday as the songs we sang on our journeys, on our special get togethers and the songs I heard my parents or my grand parents sing. That was all the live music we needed then and even now.

December 2018. On a rain drenched christmas eve in Nuremberg, I heard the mellifluous strains of 'Hallelujah'. As people milled around the Europe's oldest Christmas market, it was as if that quartet conveyed the timeless spirit of the festival through their music. That is what a European Christmas will mean forever. Perhaps their notes will carry the sound of their music way too far, for way too long.

And just as I was least expecting any musical interlude, over dinner at a neighbourhood place, I heard the most beautiful piece of violin in my life. Perhaps my word is too small or perhaps my soul hasn't been drenched in enough music as yet. But these three live performances will remain 'alive' forever. Of all the things I try to share in life, these will be exceptions. Nothing could recreate their magic, nothing could replace/replicate those notes etched in my memory.  During my last, I hope these will be the moments that will flash before my eyes. These will be the moments which will assure of a life well lived.

Tree of Life!

"For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is Happiness."

~Hermann Hesse, 

Bäume. Betrachtungen und Gedichte

Timeless Afternoons..

There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.

~Jorge Luis Borges

Party(ing) Politics!!

Just as we have active smokers (those who smoke themselves) and passive smokers (those who happen to inhale the smoke emitted by smokers) and both seem to be affected equally; the same could be said about the party lot in this part of the country. On one hand there are people who throw and attend a party and on the other there are those who partake vicariously (and without much choice) through the effects generated by former's activities. To elucidate, as I write this blog post, my mind continuously drifts towards the sounds emanating from the party-scene in the lawn below my house. Much as I try to concentrate on any job, I can not help but notice the loud music playing in the background since morning, the  hum-drum of vehicles bringing in provisions and the constant clatter of crockery.

Surprisingly, the experience of passive partying has been similar across the years and cities that I have lived in. The predictability of the event managers is even funnier. Without actually knowing the occasion one can guess the same through the music playing in the background. Certain songs for certain occasions have remained unchanged since even our parents' time. And it must have been some major lapse on the part of Bollywood(-inspired) music industry that the newer symphonies have been largely unsuccessful at displacing the older and the popular ones. Needless to mention, an occasional burst of western music is considered to be reflective of somewhat higher status (that you can actually appreciate music in English!) And Yes, Vengaboys' Brazil remains an eternal dance favorite since the days I was writing my class 10 exams to this day as I celebrate three decades of my existence. 

Before one actually moves on from music, I have never been able to understand why the music for a party scheduled in the evening is put on in the afternoon itself.. Even if it were to keep the workers in good mood (which they are rarely in and I hope to do something about it by opening a butler finishing school after retirement), am sure even they must be bored with the same music blaring at different locations day after day. Alas, we have people with ailments in this society who can't stand loud music, students who have to prepare for their year-round exams and little babies who fuss endlessly finding music to be just another excuse.

I do not even find myself qualified and capable of being able to write about the dressing-up part. For one, being a lady who is in a profession which calls for utmost 'simplicity' when it comes to meeting people, on umpteen occasions it has been presumed that for me (and the likes of me) it must be impossible to possess any 'real' fashion sense. At a few important theme parties it was even thought by the esteemed lady wives that the lady officers could be given a skip for perhaps the reason cited above.

When it comes to food, the guests are completely at the mercy of their hosts (and their VIP guests) in India.What will be served and when and how it will be served has nothing whatsoever to do with the socially acceptable norms. Understandably, it is not everyday that the guest gets to throw a lavish party at the leading venue of the city and attended by the glitterati at their chosen hour. So what if one of the posh-set decides to carry on drink till the wee hours, the dinner can wait and the lesser guests can benefit from the extended happy hours!!

I do not consider it appropriate to spoil the party season by raising 'politically incorrect' questions ranging from how the garbage generated at such venues ought to be disposed or why millions are spent on outrageously extravagant decorations. Even as I begun to ponder about these, I know well enough that any expression of such politically incorrect views will be straightaway attributed to my JNU-ness (if there is a thing such as this).

And yes, it needs no prizes for guessing that there ain't any invite received from the guests hosting the soiree in the lawns below!