Posted on May 24, 2010June 11, 2012 in The Life And Times

Friends

We’re all noise. We’re all discordant, radiating ourselves into space until we fade away. In this chaos, we find harmony in others sometimes. All of us at some point find at least one other to comfortably coexist with, to blend with, to resonate with. Sometimes, the lucky ones find more. We find groups of us that get along. A bunch of us who can all completely be ourselves around each other. A bunch of us who now carry parts of each other within ourselves. A bunch of us who can remind each other of who we are. A few people I could call family sometimes. Harmony is always transient, contained in a larger chaos. But it feels like the harmony can outlast us. Maybe we’ll hold together.

To an outsider we’d be as refreshing and intangible as a song or a symphony. Some of you may listen. Fewer still, will wonder what holds us together. And it might even be possible someday that one more finds his place within us. After all, how did we find each other? Floating through the noise, something caught on and made sense and stuck around. I still believe that we’re all noise though. Too much of each other and you’ll hear it.

(This is somewhat, but not entirely a response to this )

Posted on May 3, 2010June 11, 2012 in Look What I Made, The Life And Times

Music

Music is all I’ve been doing with my free time for about a week and a half now. The awesome picture below was taken last night on my terrace. Me, a guitar, a laptop, two plectrums, a camera, a tripod, a bottle of water, and a friend who joined me after a while. A very productive evening, this was. Since I don’t feel articulate enough to write anything at the moment and I don’t have any good recordings of any of these songs, I will leave you with just this photograph.

Posted on April 30, 2010June 11, 2012 in The Life And Times

30-Apr-2010

I haven’t been here for a while. The main reason is that I’ve been trying to make songs. And I don’t feel like writing blog entries after writing songs. It’s all about expressing creativity, if you ask me. My primary motivation for ever posting anything here is to express creativity. When this creativity has other outlets I no longer need to post here anymore. But I’m here now, just to let this blog know that it’s not forgotten about.

About the songs that I’ve written, I could post the lyrics here but I’d rather post the songs themselves once I have a good recording of them along with the lyrics so you’ll just have to wait. About the rest of my life of late, I’m tired. I have hardly ever slept over 8 hours a night and this is a good thing. It’s just that I’m tired. It isn’t easy to try to do everything you want to do along with a full time job. But its torture to not do everything I want. The story of my life is desperately lacking some romance at the moment, but that it has been for a very long time. At least there’s enough of everything else going around. There are times when I feel that if my life was a book, the reader would definitely have stopped reading by this point. This is not one of those. What I really want to do is write something. A short story, a fictional blog, anything more that a song and a blog post like this one. Unfortunately, the only thing my mind is willing to do at the moment is sleep

But I will write something soon, and you’ll be the first to know. Until then, good night.

Posted on March 29, 2010June 11, 2012 in The Life And Times

Work life

I don’t normally do things I don’t want to. In fact, I try as hard as possible to not do things I don’t want to. I never really studied for exams after the point where I thought I would pass them, I never attended class if I didn’t feel like, I didn’t wear full pants when I didn’t feel like, I woke up when I felt like, and I slept when I wanted to for most of my life. All these people who tell you that you have to work hard to get what you want, and that if you torture yourself now you’ll have it easy in the end, I think they’ve all lost their minds. And I’m more sure about this now than I ever was. I’ve seen 30 year olds with bellies the size of pregnant women who sit at their desks for over 9 hours a day and live what you would all call the ideal life and I know that they haven’t known the pleasure that I would get when I made a song or wrote a short story or probably even a damn blog post for even a day in their lives.

I’m happy being happy. I believe in indulgence. And this is mostly why I know I can’t work a 9 hour a day job. No matter how good the work is, no matter what the benefits are. I can’t work in that environment, I think it’s absolutely inhibitory to any kind of productivity. Why would anyone be driven to work at a place where they care more about how much time you spend doing what you do rather than what you do? I don’t want to go to work tomorrow. And I, being the person I know myself to be, would not go to work tomorrow. I know that even if I do go to work tomorrow, I won’t accomplish much there. There, where the clocks on the wall watch you work, with the air-conditioning and the artificial lighting and the artificial personalities and stale humour and well, I could go on.

I haven’t seen the sunset in weeks! I would understand why you wouldn’t think this is a big deal, but honestly, try it. Sunsets just have a way of making my mind work. I heard that in early Mayan civilisations they would have a particular time of day when everyone would stop whatever they were doing and watch the sun set. I don’t know how reliable this information is, but it makes sense. We tend to overlook these things living our busy lives in these big cities. I live about a kilometer from the sea and yet I hardly ever go to the beach anymore. Here, I actually found a research that links decreased exposure to sunlight with cognitive impairment among depressed individuals.

But here’s the thing, I probably will go to work tomorrow and I probably will sit there in office all day and do nothing productive. Just accept money for some time of my life. Who was the idiot who said “time is money?” He ought to be locked in solitary confinement and be paid in millions for it. And yes, I can think of buying myself a new guitar or an iTouch or a Wii, or even a fucking PS3 with a hi-def TV. If I wait a bit longer I’ll have enough to buy a car, not that I want a car, I’m just saying. I can go to Blue Frog and not be that bothered by how much they charge for entry or for alcohol inside. But I think I’m lucky enough to know that I don’t want any of that as much as I want the freedom to be able to do what I want and when I want. I wouldn’t mind having a 2GB mp3 player and traveling by buses and trains and living as stingily as I did in college.

I had decided that I would stay here until I figured stuff out and until I had enough money to do whatever else I might want to do after this. But I’ve had enough money for a while now, and I don’t know what I want to do for the rest of my life but I’m pretty sure that there’s no one thing I could do for the rest of my life. I know what I don’t want to do for the rest of my life and that, I’m sure that I’m sure about by now. (No, I didn’t type that twice by mistake, notice the comma.) So why haven’t I left yet? Well, because when I told them I wanted to leave my generous employers said that I would get to work with them in New York for two to three months in a complicated arrangement that means I have to stay with them till somewhere around November this year. And though this is a very sweet deal there’s a part of me that’s hoping that this won’t work out, hoping that all managers are indeed the rotten bastards I would like to believe they are and that they pull out of this deal at the last minute just so that I can show them the finger and go on and live the rest of my life being me.

But despite all this, I will go to work tomorrow. Do something that I wouldn’t normally do. Do something that’s not me, and watch time pass by as I grow a little more estranged from myself. I will show them the finger someday, before the end of this year, and that I’m sure of. And if you can relate to any of what I said then I suggest that one day you sit alone and watch the sun set and think about it. Because I think that watching the sunset is more important than any of this.

Posted on February 3, 2010June 11, 2012 in The Life And Times

Simplicity

There’s a sense of simplicity I get after being out of the routine of my life for a while. Absolute simplicity. I feel like I know the answers to all your questions, and they can all be answered in under a minute each. I know what’s right and what’s wrong, and what’s neither of the two and really doesn’t matter. And the distinction is really easy to make. I know what I’m doing wrong. I know how to save our environment and just how much we’re going to fuck it up before we manage to do that. I know which direction our society should be heading in and what we need to do now to start getting there. I know what’s inevitable. Well, I wouldn’t use the word ‘inevitable’ but I know what’s very, very likely to happen. I know why you’re unhappy and dissatisfied and anxious and angry, and yes, I’m talking about you specifically.

Why doesn’t everyone see this simplicity? Because everyone over-complicates things by adding unnecessary variables in the equation. People like to complicate things to get the answers they need to justify their their wants and beliefs, to help them be them . Hitting a contradiction sooner or later is inevitable very, very likely. You probably need to forget your place in it all for a while and look at things from as far away as possible to feel what I feel. I went away and I met myself there. I met myself after quite a while. I don’t mean that in the way you look at yourself in a mirror, I saw who I really was, what I really believe, what parts of me I’m afraid to let surface.

In spite of everything I’ve said here I know that this feeling is transient. I know that I could be wrong, and about something or the other, I will be. But at this moment, I’ve got more of it right than you. The question really worth asking is, where does go from here?

The answers, I could tell you. But I really don’t believe they should be sold as answers to anything. To be completely honest, I know that they’re not the answers good enough to stand the test of time. I might share some of them with you over time as thoughts and nothing more, because that’s what they really are. And this is just a feeling. It’ll be gone soon enough.

Posted on January 22, 2010June 11, 2012 in The Life And Times

Hampi

Currently Listening
Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skin-Nerd
By Lynyrd Skynyrd
Free Bird

Update from my life: I’m leaving for hampi on Saturday. I don’t think I’ve been on this kind of a high for as long as I’ve been working, which is wrong in so many ways that I’m not going to elaborate on it. This one week of freedom is all I get after 7 months of working. Slavery, this is. But then it isn’t really, because I can leave whenever I want. I’ll be moving to Thane the week after that, that’ll make it even harder to leave this job but at least I’ll have as much free time on my hands as I want.

So this Saturday, I’ll be going to hampi. And where I’ll go from there I don’t really know. How long I’ll be there, I don’t know. It’s this sense of freedom that I really love. It resonates within my being. If you don’t know me then I can tell you that freedom is one of my most fundamental values. I need to have a sense of absolute freedom to be truly happy. So that’s what this vacation will be about, perfect unadultrated freedom. Imprisoned within the time span of 9 days.

I will leave for Hampi this saturday and you won’t hear anything from me for a while after that. Not that you’d expect to, but if you’re lucky I’ll end up writing a bit there and then I can post it here when I get back.

“I’m as free as a bird now, and this bird you cannot change.
I’m the bird you cannot change.
And this bird you cannot change.
Lord knows I can’t change.
Lord help me I can’t change.
Lord, I can’t change.
Won’t you fly, free bird?”
*insane 4 minute solo

Posted on January 12, 2010June 11, 2012 in The Life And Times

Rebel

I am a rebel by nature. Not that much of a rebel, if I think of all the rebels I’ve heard of, but a rebel, still. And as a self-proclaimed rebel, I think that a rebel would be a rebel whether or not he had something to rebel against. It’s in our nature to reject some part of the world we live in. We look for causes, for things to call right, for dreams and visions worth fighting for. We could invent them, if necessary. The important thing is having something seemingly bigger than ourselves to fight for.

Sometimes I believe that the things I want to fight for are the most important things in the world, but most times I know they’re not. Not to other people, not to me, not to the world itself. And if I had to fight for my self enough, I wouldn’t care enough or have the energy to fight for anything else. The truth is that we’re happy enough of the time, and we’re all fine. The world’s fine. I’m fine. It’s likely that I’ll always be fine.

This however, is not enough. I’m not fine with being fine all the time. Fine is okay, fine is fine, but fine does not satisfy me. Fine doesn’t go with the rebel in me. I can give you a few dozen reasons why it’s not right to settle for fine even though the ups and downs I’ll win by fighting may never sum up to the same level, but they’re not important. What is important is that being me keeps me happy most of the time. And it just wouldn’t be me to settle for fine. Hence, I must rebel.

Posted on December 24, 2009June 11, 2012 in The Life And Times

I tried

I know that I was supposed to write something once a week on this blog, but I just couldn’t. I promise you, dear reader, that I tried. I carried around that notebook, and wrote quite a bit of crap in it, but you would probably enjoy it as much as Vogan poetry. So I will hold out until I write something that’s really worth anything before I post it here. I just thought I should let you know. I also think it’s really pathetic that I can’t write anything anymore, but hopefully *crosses fingers* that will get better with time.

Good night.

Posted on November 29, 2009June 11, 2012 in The Life And Times

The blank page / To creativity!

Now that I travel 4 hours a day to and from work I’m left with almost no time for anything else. I try sometimes, to put this time to good use. Apart from having books to read and music to listen to, I bought a notebook to write stuff in. This notebook lay in my bag untouched for almost a month (one time I opened it, stared at the first page for a while and put it back in my bag) until finally, I wrote this:-

The blank page / To creativity! (6/10/09)

Does the blank page scare you? The blank page intimidates me. It stresses me out. It makes me feel like shutting the book and tossing the pencil. The blank page is unearthly. It’s pure, plain, empty, and its emptiness is contagious. It seeps into my mind and reduces all thought to void.

It seems unconquerable. To add to a blank page, to create out of nothing, impossible. A mountain insurmountable. I look at it, admire its beauty, admire those with the courage and skill to conquer it and then turn away.

But sometimes… Sometimes creativity once believed to be dead rises from its grave and roars a deafening roar from the back of my head. Then, with one sentence, with one word, as easily as life can be ended with a piercing bullet, the blank page is conquered. And after that one brave word follow thousands more, millions more. They sing, they dance, they play. They give birth to stories of hope and despair, take you on a rollercoaster ride of emotion, and spread the light of thought in this universe of infinity. They embrace you, inspire you, and share your loneliness with you.

As witness to this event, these words will testify. To remind me that blank pages can be conquered, that they can be even more beautiful when filled, and each individual is gifted with his own creativity which never dies. Creativity which will conquer books, page by page, word by word.