Category: Life Ordinary

  • Keynotes

    There are keys that unlock memories, some of them happen to be on a keyboard, the musical type. And that’s exactly what happened when I chanced upon a keyboard at a relative’s place. I started with the easy stuff that I could still remember – nursery rhymes 😀

    That was followed by some attempts at carnatic music. Some successful, and some not. Lots of rust. And lots of immediate connections, where the fingers knew automatically where to go. And I was asked how i knew, and then, how long I had learnt. No time is quite enough, but in 9 years, you could learn quite some.

    Thanks to the interest I had then, Dad bought me a Casio when I was in school. You’d have played with one at some point in your life? The ones with 100 instrument simulations and background beats? It was good fun to learn Bolly numbers by self, practice till it was perfected, and then try out alternate beats and backgrounds. It was also tougher to play carnatic, quite unwieldy, and therefore more fun.

    It lost out quite a bit towards the last two years of school life thanks to the school team’s cricket and cultural calendar. Just like quizzing lost when Dumb C became an obsession, around the same time. And while the singing had a longer shelf life, that too stopped after college. Campus politics was also fun, and sometimes  serious, just like beaches and business studies. 🙂

    A few keys and out came the snapshot of life. Meanwhile, remember the room? The keyboard sits on the cupboard, high up on the topmost shelf. Out of reach, out of reckoning, thanks to some carelessness (left the batteries inside too long). Like the aspirations it had kindled a long time back – out of reach? Out of reckoning? When, sometime in life,  fun took a backseat, perhaps unconsciously. When i go home, I fiddle with the keyboard, no sound comes out, and I never bother to change the batteries and try to make it work.

    Today is friday, it is my day to do what i want
    Mama can tell me that i’m goin nowhere, i’m just a prisoner of my fate

    I could say fate, or I could say time, or I could say priorities, and after a while, all these would amount to what I could call baggage, but I doubt if any of them would quite satisfy my own mind. I sometimes think its fear, of what would happen if I explored what once used to be fun, and found out I had changed. Maybe these things are safer in the past, maybe we couldn’t handle each other in the present..or future. I’m still wondering how I should go ahead with a few of these unfinished businesses, and also wondering if there’s such a thing as a last bus.

    until next time, to get the drive…

  • Pity

    No one knew how the treasure myth originated, but it spread. And the eyes of men gleamed with greed. They created armies, with promises of the booty’s share. The digging started, and the city was pitted against formidable foes – BWSSB, BBMP. He hoped they’d find the treasure soon, so he could ride in peace.

    until next time, the pits!!

  • Ends and beginnings

    Work took me someplace where I normally wouldn’t be found – an AOL (Art Of Living) discourse. While I have nothing against those who choose that path, I don’t see myself there. Standing there, as a non participant while a few thousand listened and performed yoga, I thought I got a few pointers to what made them a part of this movement. One was a feeling of belonging to a community that had the same wavelength and subscribed to the same thought processes and the other was a meaning, a purpose that the movement gave to their life.

    Since it was an official event, I got dropped back at home, and in the process got to do something that i rarely get to do – forget the road, the traffic and the world ahead and soak in the effect of humanity passing by. I don’t know if you enjoy what could be uncharitably labelled gawking, but if you pause and consider that each face, and each expression contains a story, maybe you’d enjoy it like you do.

    I passed Resthouse Road on the way, and saw Pecos and Guzzler’s Inn, not places I frequent, but places that are ‘tagged’ in my memories of Bangalore from the time I came here. As i proceeded down Brigade Road, i also saw the signage of Vaayu, a lounge bar, and thought I could see a difference in the crowd that each catered to. I realised that after a while, after a few generations had passed, Bangalore’s character most likely wouldn’t include Pecos, although we would, in our denial of mortality, not think of it that way now.

    I reached home, and after the obligatory channel flipping settled down to Rocky Balboa, the comfort of a ‘seen before many times’ movie that will let your thoughts drift and you still wouldn’t feel left out. I never thought I’d quote from a Rocky movie, but it seemed to fit in

    Ya know they always say if you live in one place long enough, you are that place.

    It stuck to me when I watched Delhi 6 the next evening. An old woman comes back to her country-city-locality to die in peace, in a place that she’s familiar and comfortable with, and finds that the place has remained unchanged, but the people haven’t. And it took me back to this post that I had written a while back – on Cochin and the cosmopolitan place it was becoming.

    So, where will I be comfortable finally – Bangalore, where I have now spent 6 years (almost to the day) and where I will (at some point in time) have lived long enough to ‘be the place’, Cochin, which I refuse to let go of, whose memories I guard like a treasure- the chaotic, humid, gets-on-your-nerves place that I consider my home, or someplace new that the cosmos has in store for me. A place which gives me a sense of belonging. A set of people who matter to me and who I matter to. And that’s where this stream of consciousness ends.

    The cosmos is listening. From the list of 143 songs in the list, on ‘shuffle’ mode, it has suddenly chosen Daughtry’s Home.

    until next time, are we on the same home page? 🙂

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